Familiar but extremely polished and well designed
Ok so when i first heard that Valve was going to go with an episodic model, so their games would be released sooner and would allow for a more TV model. Where their are cliffhangers and you can't wait to play the next installment. Then after a while I started to think it was stupid. The length of the games was the main issue. If it was 5 hours and you would get the next installment soon... as in at most a month I would love the idea. The best part about shows like 24 and Lost is waiting to see whats going to happen. However, then I started to hear that Episode 2 and 3 would come out within 6 months each. Ugh I thought. This whole episodic thing is going to crash and burn, but after playing it I have eaten my own words. First off yes it took me around 4-5 hours to beat it. Yes my game crashed like hell many times because my PC hates Half-Life. I figured out the problem and fixed it so I'm not going to include that in my score.
Doing the game in a way where everything needs to have a point and there is no time to waste really helped this game out a lot. If it was slow paced in any way it would ruin it. And valve does not screw up in that department. Non stop action interwoven with great character moments. It's so much fun to just watch the characters interact with the environment, each other, and sometimes even you. The animations are just amazing. Perfect lip sync and amazing voice acting really bring out the characters. Even more so than Half-Life 2 did. There are some really cool player controlled real time "cutscenes" that I won't spoil, but be prepared to smile. Sure the game has all the same weapons from Half-Life 2, but really this is just the beginning in a trilogy of episodes. In the end the game does enough new things that it didn't really matter to me. It of course ends a cliffhanger, though not in a huge story related manner. That aspect only comes in with the episode 2 teaser trailer.
Since this is based off of the Half-Life 2 engine almost entirely it does look a little dated when compared to games like Crysis. However Crysis isn't even out yet. It's pretty sad that no PC game has come along since Half-Life 2 and raised the bar any higher. There are some nice effects though added to the game. Not just the obvious stuff, but nice changes under the hood that you don't really notice until you go back and play Half-Life 2.
Overall I think that this could turn out to be a very good little Trilogy. Where the sum of the parts could total to be longer and better than Half-Life 2 itself. If the teaser trailer for episode II is any indication the direction being taken is going to be a little different from Episode One which in the end should help with creating some new and fresh with each installment. Oh and there is the commentary track throughout the game. Very similar to the Riddick design, but sadly everyone is reading off of a piece of paper. Which makes the tracks much much shorter than Riddick and sound far to forced. I suppose they wanted to have a plan and give out useful information. But in the end the best part about Riddick was how the developers would just talk and say whatever came to mind about the subject. It was spontaneous, funny like a real commentary track should be. Yes you should prepare for what you are going to say, but don't read from a script.
In the end the problems in the game really just didn't matter to me. I having so much fun. The lack of vehicles and truly varied environments didn't matter! The lack of anything really answered in the story didn't matter either! In the end this is part of a bigger story, so at the moment i'm willing to let things go. I just hope it all ends up being worth it!
