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In this game you play as one of the military personnel you see throughout Half Life 1, Corporal Adrien Shepherd. The controls and design are the same as that now-classic game and while the story over all may not be as good as the first game, there is still a lot of fun times here. On the outset, if you enjoyed Half Life, you certainly will enjoy this game a whole lot. Opposing Force is very derivative of this experience but this is most definitely a positive, not a detractor. Half Life was a ground breaking FPS game with an amazing story and universe it created to boot. I guess it's tradition that this one isn't any different. I still have gripes with it's latter sections, but I have similar feelings about most Half-Life games, dipping quality here and there. Enough enemies and weapons are introduced to make it feel new, and the same sort of level and game design is present to keep it familiar. It's to the extent that I consider this game to be an almost direct accompanying piece to it. The same endearing style that HL1 has is carried over pretty faithfully here. If I have tons of weapons and ammo, I need more enemies to fight to make it challenging, but fighting tons of enemies in a row with Half-Life's mechanics gets a little stale for me. I don't dislike the gunplay or anything, but I'm not exactly sure I get *how* I'm supposed to enjoy the more straightforward fights in this game as divorced from environmental and resource limited circumstances. By that time the weapon choices have expanded further and people who enjoy Half-Life solely for the shooting parts will probably have more fun with it than I did. The latter half of the game features a lot of firefights with big aliens and bullet spongy black ops guys. I wish some of the high stakes puzzle elements and shorter encounters could have stayed around longer. But there's something about a soldier being lost in the chaos of a collapsing research facility overrun by aliens and black ops that better captured that background storytelling thing the Half-Life games do than in the first. I'm "something of a scientist myself" and want as little to do with the military in real life as in fiction.
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It's funny that I identify more with this protagonist than in HL1. It wasn't until the more action heavy latter half that my praise wavers a bit. The initial few missions in particular are really well done. That's just cool.Half-Life 2 is my preferred version of the series, and yet parts of this one worked for me in ways Half-Life 1 failed to. The first time one came tumbling down the road at us, we'd already been trained to handle them without even realizing it.
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We learned how to pick up, throw, and catch, we increased our bond with the eager robotic companion, and we discovered how to defeat rollermines, an enemy we wouldn't encounter until much later in the game. When it first fell into our hands we played catch with Dog, which wasn't just a cool sequence but functioned as a sneaky tutorial. What made the gravity gun so cool in Half-Life 2 wasn't just that it could lift stuff-it was all the different things that could be accomplished by lifting stuff. It's the gravity gun's final form and it made the perfect tool, surprisingly, even better. In a corridor packed with Combine you can rip a soldier from his spot and send him pinwheeling back through the rest. And then you can blast those Combine ragdolls around the room, send them spinning and slamming into each other. Instead of just picking up objects you can pick up people, and it's a blast, yanking surprised soldiers off the ground, pulling them wriggling through the air, their limbs violently jerking and flopping in a way that makes Darth Vader's Force Choke look like a gentle embrace. The tool that could do everything except that one thing now does that one thing, too. But when it passes through the confiscation field in the Citadel, it isn't destroyed like the rest of your weapons. The gravity gun, for all its usefulness in Half-Life 2, can only pick up non-organic objects.