Half-Life 2: Episode Two (2007) (PC) (Valve)
7I never really liked Half-Life 2. The first game was a significant step forward for shooters in terms of scripting and being able to deliver a cohesive, believable and almost cinematic experience, but with the sequel it never felt like Valve had any fresh new ideas on how to continue evolving the genre. The Source engine was a technical achievement at the time and still holds up well from a visual standpoint, but the drab Eastern Bloc settings and anemic shooter mechanics of Half-Life 2 didn't feel particularly impressive even back in 2004.
Through a sale on Steam I recently got Episode Two, which I previously hadn't played. I've heard a lot of good things about it, but can't say I'm sold on it after the first couple of hours. The episode begins with a boring and generic mine level that seems to drag on forever, and for some inexplicable reason Valve keeps adding small platforming sections and puzzles which really have no place in an FPS. The new enemies look plain bad and are mostly annoying to fight, but half-way through the fourth chapter I'm finally getting to gun down soldiers instead of sneaky critters, so hopefully the rest of Episode Two will be more enjoyable.
Note: For some reason it was downright impossible to get the audio and video to sync up properly while recording this clip, so I had to resort to extensive editing to keep some semblence of correlation between image and sound. It's still nowhere near perfect, but it's the best I could do without spending the entire afternoon on it.
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