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Title: Half-Life 2
Released: November 2004
Official Website
Update History
Steam Game Page
Half-Life 2 Walkthrough
Half-Life 2 Achievements

Few games have had a turbulent a development period as Valve’s successor to Half-Life did. The game went through multiple iterations, suffered infamous delays and had its source code leaked onto the internet. With the odds stacked against it, how could Half-Life 2 ever live up to the astronomical expectations surrounding it? Well, the easy answer is that it did. It debuted as one of the greatest games of all time, earning the love of critics and fans alike.

Half-Life 2 introduced City 17. Players returned as Gordon Freeman, but not to a world they remembered. A decade on from the Black Mesa Incident, Earth has been transformed by a cosmic conglomerate called ‘The Combine’. What humans remain are imprisoned within the broken remains of their own cities, their fate in the hands of scientist-despot Dr Breen, a collaborator with the Combine regime. Returned to Earth by the G-Man, the terrible repercussions of Half-Life must be dealt with.

A whole cast of survivors were introduced, from new faces such as resistance fighter Alyx Vance and scientist Judith Mossman, to the return of old favourites Dr Kleiner and Barney. The game was expansive and grand, spanning multiple locations inspired by the Eastern European aesthetics: deserted coastlines and grim prison complexes to name a couple, and a climax in the Combine edifice the Citadel. But for many, Half-Life 2 is most notable for the ‘Gravity Gun’, a device capable of manipulating physics objects within the game-world. It was praised not only for its innovation, but in the seamless way in which it was integrated into the game’s design.