Here’s a quick and dirty review of Valve’s “Orange Box”, containing Half Life 2: Episode Two, Team Fortress 2 and Portal (along with the original Half Life 2 and Episode One, both of which I’ve already taken a look at in previous blog entries.)
Half Life 2: Episode Two
Short and sweet, would be my best description of it. I got about five hours of gameplay out of the episode. While it’s far shorter than Episode One was, and certainly a fraction of what Half Life 2 was, I was pleasantly surprised to see just how much work Valve had put into the quality of this release.
The expansive new outdoor environments are just stunning to experience. Beautiful, really. The action was pretty intense too, especially the second to last chapter in which you’re faced with using the gravity gun to toss explosives onto Striders and blow them up. The Strider sequence was the most challenging for me, and certainly one of the more intense experiences I’ve had in a game in recent memory.
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