Half-Life 2 Review

Six years of development, a source tree leaked to the internet, and an engine written specifically to make a face act. Half-Life 2 is a technical argument delivered as a road trip. The facial rig gives Alyx eyebrows that carry more performance than most scripted cutscenes of the era, and the physics integration turns objects from spectacle into vocabulary. The gravity gun is the cleanest case of a mechanic and a piece of world-building being the same object, and Ravenholm exists to prove the point with sawblades.

City 17's opening station says everything about occupation without a line of exposition, and Nova Prospekt escalates with real control. The long airboat and buggy stretches are padding that the pacing never quite recovers from, and the final Citadel act hands you a superweapon and forgets to build encounters worth using it on. Everything around those two sags is a shooter treating animation and physics as design rather than polish.