GamePlay In the spirit of Tomb Raider (most popular example, although it is used elsewhere) Half-Life features an "introduction" level. A holographic woman walks you through an obstacle course teaching you the basics as well as going over a couple of the new movement tactics such as the superjump.

Something that seems to elude about 95% of all 3D shooters out there is making a game that satisfies the gamer through means other than just blowing stuff up and making people die. I'm confident in stating that I believe Half-Life has achieved this. How so?

Well, it's simple. I didnt even have a weapon for at least 45 minutes when I started the game, and was still engrossed by the game. I was happy wandering around talking to scientists who in turn liked to bitch at me about being 30 minutes late for my appointment.

I can surmise from that experience and further playing of the game that there is more to Half-Life than just killing monsters. In my eyes, this is a good thing.

The Levels
Here we go, one of the things about Half-Life that truely impressed me the most was consistency in level design. Unlike many other 3D shooters out there, Half-Life is incredibly consistent in design and feel. Many factors contributed to this, from the fact that the level design team is generally equal in experience, and that many of them work on the same level and share work.

Something that also impressed me that I didnt mention while up at Valve, was the fact that more often than not when I was shown a particular area, it was more often than not being shown by one level designer who wasnt even the main architect for that particular bsp. They were all proud of the game, not just individual accomplishments but of what the team had produced. I dont think the guys up at Valve even realized how odd this was. This is a good thing.

Another point about the levels is that they arent really "levels" as it were. There are literally about 100 different bsps in the game. All generally pretty small. The reasoning behind this is much quicker load times, and the feel of a "continuous world" as well. Half-Life will run on a machine with only 16 megs of ram. The load times between levels are snappy as hell, just as advertised. No more firing up the game, and going to grab a beer between level loads.

Architecture in general was well done and convincing. The level designers really seemed to have a feel for making the player forget that the world was made of polygons.

Artwork / Models
A choice that was made over at Valve was to go extremely heavy on the animation team. Custom animations catored to each particular level and architecture was incredibly common throughout the game. Just going through the intro level with the hologram showing you all the new moves it was obvious Valve put a lot of time and effort into this aspect of the game.

The actual visuals of the character models were very nice, but didnt blow me away or anything.

The Gordon model (your character) is kinda cool, one problem I have though is its just a bit strange to see an old dude with a beard in deathmatch. I mean, no matter how cool deathmatch is.. its still some old dude with a beard. I hope they get some sort of generic military type guy in there to play with in DM.

Obviously game companies in general are held back by poly counts and minimum system requirements. Judging from the work in Half-Life though, whatever Valve works on next will have some of the best models and animations in the world.

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