Half-Life 2

The PC first-person powerhouse finally appears on Xbox, has it been worth the wait?

Who would have thought it? Here we are with a brand new Microsoft console being released yet here on the original Xbox we have one of the best games released for the system. It's surprising how well the game has been translated to the Xbox. It's pretty much the same game that appeared on PC and Valve should be commended on an incredibly job in porting the game over, this is how it's done.

Half-Life 2 is split into massive stages that seem more like episodes than individual levels. Some sections are claustrophobic and tense and recall horror movies; others are wide open and fast-paced and owe a lot to movies such as Spielberg's Dual. Two of the levels require long journeys by vehicle, with the quest broken up by action sequences along the way. These set pieces are as tightly-plotted as the best Hollywood thriller yet never come across as anything other than a natural event along the way.

Sometimes the length of the levels can seem daunting. An early section involving canals and an airboat does seem to go on forever. I think that this level was made a little too long. Most of it was a lot of fun, but by the end I was wondering if I was playing an airboat simulator rather than Half-Life 2. As you'd expect on Xbox with less system memory than most PCs the game does load frequently, more frequently than the PC version, but it's pretty unobtrusive and doesn't spoil the fun.

Don't get the impression that Half-Life 2 is just about moving from place to place. This is no point-and-click adventure remember, it's a first person shooter, and shooting is something that Gordon Freeman has to do a lot. There's an impressive arsenal on offer, including Gordon's trusty crowbar, with enough variety in weaponry to achieve individual tasks or appeal to different styles of play. I found myself rather fond of the fuel-rod crossbow, perhaps due to the impracticality of the weapon or more likely because of the mess it made.

The enemies Gordon faces for much of the early parts of the game are the Combine soldiers, these gasmask wearing stormtroopers are the stuff of fascist nightmares. Unfortunately they aren't as smart as we might expect from a Half-Life game. Once engaged in combat they have a tendency to rush into danger rather than taking a more thoughtful approach. Often their smarts don't get a chance to shine as Gordon has such an awesome arsenal of weaponry available many a Combine soldier will be spray-painted across the nearest wall before he has a chance to plot some cunning strategy.

The other enemy type Gordon meets on a regular basis is the legion of head-crab wearing mutants. If you've played the first Half-Life you know the score here. The various nasties, head crabs etc. provide the game's horror moments. One scene in a churchyard almost appears to be a pastiche of zombie movies. While the mutant/alien creatures provide many of the game's scares, these moments often feel more like Doom than Half-Life, with Gordon faced with a room full of mutants to be destpatched – the difficulty coming from numbers rather than clever AI.

Despite the wealth of high-tech weaponry at Gordon's disposal, the real thrill in Half-Life 2 is making use of the amazing physics engine to dispatch the enemy. Believe me, what might have seemed a neat E3 demo really does work in the game. Once Gordon has got hold of the physics gun a whole new world of insane violence opens up. Sure, it's possible to hold up objects as a shield, but the real fun is throwing flaming barrels at enemy troops, flinging circular-saw blades into a room full of possessed or dropping cargo containers onto whole squads of Combine soldiers with a crane.

You'll be surprised just how much puzzle solving appears in the game, yet it never seems forced, never seems like you are merely back-tracking to pull switches that open doors. The physics play a huge part in the puzzle solving. It's not just a case of building towers of objects to climb over fences, this is using the properties of objects to solve riddles. For example, you may find that air-filled plastic barrels are just the ticket for making a ramp float, enabling the airboat to bypass a tricky obstacle. Logical thinking is the order of the day and there's always a sense of real achievement in solving a puzzle in an elaborate way using the physics.