This one is hard. Very hard.

The FPS genre has moved on a bit since Half-Life 2’s time. But then, elements of the game were way ahead of their time… Hmm…

Let’s start with Half-Life 2 and mash in the Episodes for ease. Half-Life 2 is simply one of the greatest First Person Shooters ever – it has a timeless feel to it and the graphics still stand up today.

On a negative note, let’s cover the fact that Episode 1 feels fairly weak and lacklustre in comparison. Not bad, by any stretch of the imagination, but I felt there were perhaps one or two too many insta-kill situations in the first section – most guilty is a section on an elevator with falling debris. Other than that – it was more than passable. Episode 2 feels slightly odd due to minor interface tweaks (which are actually a marked improvement), but has a superb pace. Had the improvements been retroactively applied to the first two elements of the game it would have been a welcome addition.

Looking at the general negatives first – I don’t really like the music in Half-Life 2, so it was turned off. My only other mild complaint would be that on occasion, I felt slightly detached from the combat. This isn’t something I can explain, because I never felt this when first playing the game in 2005, but I think it might be that I far prefer the visceral feel of aiming down your sights like in Call of Duty or STALKER. That being said, the pistol has a fantastic kinetic feel to it, as does the pulse rifle. If I’m pushing it, I might add that the driving controls feel slightly clumsy but are compensated for by a decent auto aim function on the vehicles.

The positives are far greater. The rest of the sound design is superb, from the background noises to the weapon sounds. Worth special mention are the enemy sounds – the flatline sound of downed combine troops, the cry of the zombies and the excellent otherworldly noises of the Hunters and Striders. This is not to mention the brilliant echo effects in open locations. Amazing. Voice acting as well is superb, in particular, Gordon Freeman’s voice actor is outstanding.

The story is well written and acted. The overall tone of the game is one of absolute hopelessness with a locked down city and abandoned industrial complexes lent a haunted and haunting atmosphere that feels both sad and oppressive. Of special note is the coast section which feels all the more special for the fact that you could essentially drive straight through most of it, but stopping at the various houses tell their own little stories through the environment. The three parts of Half-Life 2 are themselves split into their own individual chapters which keeps the story and player’s goals manageable, so essentially you tend to be more focussed on the fact that you need to deal with the problem at hand before tending to the salvation of mankind. This keeps the epic quality of the story truly epic – and on occasion, less important than the current task – while concentrating on the human details.

Characters, despite being stereotyped to a degree (the absent-minded professor, the down-to-Earth trustworthy security guard, the conflicted betrayer) the human characters are superb and genuinely likeable. The facial animation lends a real edge to the relationships – especially between Eli Vance and his daughter Alyx. This relationship is absolutely believable and let’s just say that very last scene in episode 2… Well, let’s not spoil it, but if you are unable to share in the experience, you are dead inside. Ironically, the player character, Gordon Freeman, is (by design) the least developed. The amount of hero worship you face puts your character into context, but to be fair he doesn’t really use his degree from MIT at any point, which is really the only information given about him.

It’s all very well and good discussing all these elements, but what about the game. As you can probably imagine from what I have already said, classifying Half-Life 2 as an FPS is misleading. Personally, I would describe it as a First-Person Adventure. The environmental puzzles feel integrated into the experience, not tacked on to a shooter. And these puzzles are superb, putting the game’s fantastic physics to excellent use and always making sense. In addition, the Ravenholm section of the game feels like a genuine survival horror and is genuinely unsettling. The driving sections are well executed with superb pacing, but as already mentioned, slightly clumsy controls. Equally clumsy is the squad management element toward the end of the main game, but it’s not cripplingly bad.

So on the whole, Half-Life 2 has aged very well indeed – the combat element slightly more than the rest, to be fair, but not enough to dent its appeal.

Team Fortress 2 is simply not my cup of tea. I played 10 games online and feel no need to play it any more. I don’t particularly like the cartoony graphics and felt the weapons were pretty weedy and ineffectual.

It may also have just been me, but I also felt like I had been thrown in the deep end a bit with no real explanation of what was going on.

So, much in the same way that I haven’t taken my negativity towards multiplayer into consideration with my other reviews, I will simply skip over Team Fortress 2, because it isn’t an element I will use. My only minor annoyance is that some of the achievements require that you play this game…

Portal – for my money – is as close to perfect as a game can come. Portal will be the first game in my entire life that I would give a 10/10 rating to. This is a big step for me. I acknowledge that no game is perfect, so to that end 10 simply indicates the closest to perfect you can get, and I have never felt a game has climbed beyond 9/10.

Portal is excellently paced, immaculately designed, superbly written and tells a simple story without reams of exposition. Each level introduces a new element to the gameplay, but makes you work it out yourself – it really is wonderfully balanced and some parts that seem impassable, especially in the final act seem shockingly simple when you work them out. Wrapping your head around the Portal Gun’s workings is simple enough when you think about it logically – go in blue portal, come orange, go in orange, come out blue – but then working out how the physics work in relation to the Portals is gently, but emphatically trained. You feel like you have LEARNED something.

I must admit that I felt that I had actually achieved something while playing the game, which is a testament to how well designed the game truly is.

The clinical design of the early stages is superb and uncluttered, so when you first come across the “behind-the-scenes” section, it feels very unsettling indeed. Up until this point the excellently voiced GLaDOS computer has already made you feel slightly ill at ease, which turns into a true feeling of foreboding as the game continues. Yet this never feels disconnected from, or contrary to, the humour in the game. Despite all the oppressive atmosphere, the writers have superbly balanced this with genuine, properly funny dialogue. GLaDOS by turns encourages, threatens and cajoles you right up to and through the final showdown with her, and despite this I felt a fair amount of guilt at having to take her down. Which leads to the sublime closing song…

I finished the game in around 3 hours in one sitting, which I personally feel was worth the money. It played out; it told its story and was done. It didn’t outstay its welcome and left me wanting more, so the song “Still Alive” at the end of the game filled me with a strange sort of relief!

So, a shining collection then… Far more relevant for those without PCs, or people who haven’t played the originals. The games all translate very well to controller, and even allows you to completely redefine your buttons, which I find a MAJOR selling point. Also the developers’ commentaries finish off the package nicely and I find them fascinating insights into game development.