They're waiting for you Gordon, in the test chamber.

If Head-crab not friend, why friend shaped?

I had this game sitting in my library for almost an year since it was given away for free by Valve on Half-Life's 25th Anniversary.[www.half-life.com] Assuming the game to be dated in terms of gameplay didn't help it either. Fast-forward 11 months to October 2024, I download it on my system thinking "This game is ancient, it must be short, easy and unsophisticated compared to what games are today; I can play it once a while when I'm bored and need a device for a mindless time-pass"...and man, I couldn't have been any more wrong than that!

I played this game on the hardest difficulty, due to my assumptions as stated. While the story is relatively simpler, the enemies are extremely smart, be it the aliens or the human enemy (especially the human enemies!). With multiple varieties of weapons, and a fair variety of adversaries, the game did manage to engage me throughout the play-through (barring a few chapters towards the end). The sound design is decent enough to be serviceable even today and the music, though few and far between the chapters, is good. The chapters themselves have enough variety to avoid repetitiveness. The game also employs clever use of simple physics, which for the time it was developed in, made this game first-of-its-kind and more sophisticated.

This is not just another 'Run-and-Gun' game from that era, but actually a 'Run-Think-Shoot-Live' one, living up to its tagline. Really looking forward to playing HL 2, which again, was given away for free by Lord GabeN, on Half-Life 2's 20th Anniversary![www.half-life.com]