Recent reviews by BenM64

There are two sorts of music in this soundtrack: atmospheric ambience to accompany exploration, and action-oriented to complement combat. I'd say Kelly Bailey did a decent job with some of these tracks. Cavern Ambience and Nepal Monastery are my favourites!

The soundtrack used to be in CD-DA format, with Half-Life reading it from the disc as you play. Unfortunately, not many computers have optical drives anymore. (・へ・ )ヾ

Anyway, since this is a free download, you may as well give this a go, especially if you've completed Half-Life at least once.

One of Valve's less-talked-about games centres around an even more obscure campaign of WWⅡ, in which the US Army and Wehrmacht, in their furious and desparate struggle for control, cause countless casualties and unparalleled atrocities for the supposed motive of—

*checks notes*

—receiving "achievements" and finding "trading cards", sometimes travelling to psychodelic, physically implausible battlefields to do so.

Some anecdotes report that a minority of veterans on either army had somehow managed to reach a deep enough level of their subconciousness to have mysteriously manipulated time around the battlefields to the extent that, bizarrely, miniature Christmas presents start materialising in the pockets of some of their troops. …Balderdash. I'll believe that when I see it.

Contrary to the more well-known WWⅡ campaign(s), the much-renowned British Army is not even implied to have existed, not even in October 1944 when they would've arrived at the German Countryside village (dod_flash.bsp). How strange!

A bit more recently, there've been reports of trace amounts of unknown campaign evidence involving Cologne (dod_koln.bsp) and some mountains (dod_alpine.bsp). Sources and their details aren't exactly reliable, however, so if anyone at Valve wants to look into and develop these further knows a thing or two about these partially-lost military operations, whether factual corrections or possible explanations, then…why not.

Overall, if you like multiplayer-only WWⅡ-themed games, I'd recommend this one. The environments are fun to explore, and the controls/physics behave a lot like in real life (e.g. wildly variable weapon recoil, limited sprinting energy, can't absorb much gunfire before dying), encouraging team-work with other players as such, without being too obnoxious and un-fun (unlike realism competition FPSes of today), and unlike in Counter-Strike, a single death doesn't block you from the rest of the round.

On the other hand, it's worth mentioning that the original Day of Defeat, in spite of running on the older GoldSrc engine, has more variety overall. Although it lacks achievements, statistics and trading cards, it has more maps, more varied objectives, another faction (the aforenamed British), more classes, and thus more weapons, than Day of Defeat: Source.
So unless Valve decides to resume work and bring some of those into this game, I suppose it's a matter of working out which one you'd rather buy. This one, with a more advanced engine and Steamworks API integration, orrrrr the original with more WWⅡ content in it, or maybe both?

A jam-packed continuation of when Valve tried something different.

What's good:

- Expands upon the unconventional gameplay of Portal with a greater variety of puzzle elements, starting with redirectable laser beams.
- The multi-player campaign goes all-out on the concept, taking as full advantage of two players as it can.
- Hilarious voice acting, particularly from Wheatley (Stephen Merchant), a goofy robot whom you meet early on, and Cave Johnson (J. K. Simmons), a nutty scientist pivotal to the backstory.
- Can make your own test chambers and play other peoples', in doing so exploring another story, this time about parallel universes, all of which integrates nicely and cleverly with the Steam Workshop.
- Very well-built from a technical standpoint; a surprising variety of off-the-shelf laptops from the early 2010s can handle Portal 2, managing 60 frames-per-second sometimes (or often, depending on your graphical preferences). Meanwhile, on gaming desktops from 2015 onwards, especially those with discrete graphics processors, you'd be laughing.
- Robust controller support, via Steam Input. Not only does it change the keyboard icons to the controller's equivalents (e.g. changing the Space Bar to the A button), it natively supports a few controller-specific features, including the DualShock 4's light bar and the Steam Controller's haptic actuators. Valve went a few extra miles with that, it seems.

What's not-so-good (or could've been better):

- Can't modularise the installation (e.g. installing the single-player campaign while leaving out the multi-player campaign), which might be concerning for players running low on storage space. Meanwhile, Microsoft Train Simulator's installer allows for unticking specific routes from being installed, proving that modular installation is doable.
- Not all of the supported languages have a corresponding voice track. I, for one, would've been interested to hear how Wheatley would sound in Japanese.
- The bonus interactive teaser for Super 8 ends by trying to open what looks like a defunct webpage (which presumably would've been about the film) in Steam's in-game browser.
- It doesn't look like the Sixense MotionPack DLC, nor the corresponding Razer Hydra, can be purchased anymore. You'd think Valve would at least attempt to preserve the former, whether with Steam Input's Joy-Con support or with VR controllers (including the ones for their own Valve Index), but thus far…nothing.
- Even though Portal 2 supports rendering with Vulkan instead of DirectX 9, it cannot be activated from the video options menu; the -vulkan parameter must be entered into the game's launch options instead. Easily fixable, I'm sure.

Overall, if you're into puzzle-platforming games, I recommend this one. There's plenty of variety and humour, and it's very well-built from a technical standpoint. You can tell that Valve put a lot of effort into the whole package overall, and I assume most players wouldn't particularly mind the drawbacks I mentioned.
However, I strongly recommend playing the original Portal beforehand; the single-player campaign will likely make a lot more sense as a result.

Ricochet has potential, and could be lots of fun with a few more maps and enough interested friends.

But as it is now, there's not enough content to justify purchasing it alone. Might be better if it were included in a GoldSrc bundle as an added bonus (including Counter-Strike 1 Anthology) or something.

Valve's debut game, in which a promising scientist Gordon Freeman, during an anomalous materials experiment, winds up in an alien invasion in which at least three factions fight for survival.

Distinct from other games of its time by having an elaborate story as its focus, giving justification to the gameplay and resulting in puzzle-solving as well (e.g. pushing boxes into place to climb to higher ledges), challenging the player's logic as well as their reflexes.

Skyrim:
> Production costs: £70 million
> Massive development team behind it
> Uses an engine descended from Morrowind's engine
> Riddled with bugs, still unfixed after years of countless ports (some of them funny, most of them game-breaking)
> Some editions are hard-coded to 16:9, despite diversity (including different aspect ratios) being a huge part of PC gaming
> Apparently there's a story, but with so many scripting glitches, how would we know?
> "More white and grey environments. What else is new."

Miasmata:
> Production costs: hardly more than £4000~ (judging by Kickstarter)
> Made by two Minnesotan brothers, who previously made surprisingly fun Windows Mobile Pocket PC games[www.ionfx.com]
> Uses a proprietary engine built from scratch (albeit reliant on DirectX)
> Satisfyingly distinguishable from Skyrim, both gameplay-wise and visually; less white-and-grey, more nature colours (and plenty of bright-green!)
> Smoothly handles every aspect ratio I try, including 3:2; pretty good for a home-made engine!
> Still some technical quirks here and there, but nothing particularly game-breaking, and understandable considering the engine's in-house, from-scratch nature. (I personally find most of them charming!)
> Play as a plague-stricken scientist who washes up on the island of Eden looking for a cure
> You could immerse yourself in Eden's ambience (for which headphones are highly recommended) with no generic NPCs bothering you. Just you and the island. Until the creature finds you…
> "Mmmmm! Who knew nature could be so relaxing? Wait, whawazzat??"

11/10; would happily plummet down a mountain again!

More like, Dark Souls: Physics-Puzzle Edition.

The original Windows Mobile 2003 version[www.ionfx.com] and its sequel[www.ionfx.com] were tricky enough. But this remake is WAY harder - like, frame-perfect, split-second-click hard. Perfect for hardcore physics-puzzle fans!

(Doesn't support Steam Cloud, however.)

The right man, Gordon Freeman, ends up in the wrong place, a dystopian Eastern European-looking empire ruled by Combine aliens. 1984 comparisons abound.
This time, physics come into play, from solving environmental puzzles to improvised weaponry.

Like the GoldSrc games (Half-Life, Opposing Force, etc.), this game is notable in Steam's history; in this case, being the first Valve game to require registration onto the account, even for the retail version. At least the servers are better-prepared now than they were in 2004. And they've added features to make the best of such a requirement since then (achievements, etc.).

Now, it's been updated for its 20th anniversary with Steam Workshop support! So now we can more easily explore player-made levels…or replace Combine soldiers with the Teletubbies. I highly recommend a sense of humour - including dark humour - for that one.