Wednesday 26 December, 2007

..and so, I reached the end. It was interesting but confusing, and I don't mean the story! The end of the game takes place inside the Citadel, a pretty cool location if I ever saw one, and is definitely exciting and awesome (in the awe-inspiring sense!). However, what confused me is that for the ending you are stripped of all weapons and are made more powerful (the suit goes up to "200" instead of "100"). Instead of the usual weapons you get to use a gravity gun that has somehow been affected so that it is more powerful. It's a lot more fun to use (you can drag soldiers around tear monitors off walls and that kind of stuff). However, it's all you have! You can't pick up any other weapons along the way (they all disappear) and there is generally very little in the way of furniture to fling around). So, the entire end of the game is basically a one-trick pony show. Use the super gravity gun to fling soldiers into each other and not much else. For quite some time I might add.

Isn't that strange?
The climax of the game is a climax in terms of story and setting, but it's a bit of a letdown in terms of gameplay. Yes, the new gravity gun is fun, but after the 3rd encounter it kind of grows old (remember, there isn't a lot of furniture lying around) and you find yourself doing the same thing over and over again.

Sigh.

Curiously, and I guess this is sort of a capstone on my generally buggy experience playing this game, when I finished the game (destroyed this last thingie) I got a message onscreen that said something like "Subject Terminated: Failed to Destroy blabla in Time". I guess I must have destroyed the final thingie too close to the deadline because I saw the "you failed" message even though I didn't, and the end cutscenes all played through just fine.

Now I am also really confused as to what the heck is going on. Who does Freeman work for anyways?

At the end of Half-Life, the G-Man hires you on behalf of his "colleagues" who are never shown and have yet to be mentioned since.

Google Video link: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7729164293900611839

It's pretty clear that they were planning to do more with the super-gravity gun's ability to grab those power spheres, as indeed they do in the first part of episode 1.

What threw me was the first time you had to get into those coffin-like prisons in the citadel. It took me a few tries to figure out that you had to press E.

LOL.
Agreed.
I think I figured out the hanging coffins pretty quickly, but I thought that it was more of a gag, because the first one I got into went in the wrong direction and I died. :-)