On top of that, these aliens appear far more sinister and sophisticated than the ones that the player had faced in the earlier games. We are introduced to an entirely new world where human civilization has been conquered and controlled by alien invaders. With Half-Life 2, we finally depart the confines of Black Mesa. With the release of Half-Life 2, they continued the story of Gordon Freeman and introduced more game-changing innovations. Platforms: Windows, Xbox, Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, macOS, Linux, Android Granted, it is a decent gameplay experience in its own right, though it doesn’t quite echo the combat and story-heavy atmosphere that made Half-Life stand out. In that case, the player can switch between the two characters to solve puzzles, and the character not being controlled by the player will instead be controlled by AI.ĭecay was released only for the PlayStation 2, so it was not as popular as earlier expansions. However, though it may have been designed to be played in split-screen with two players, it can still be played in single-player. Naturally, the game plays like the original Half-Life, but with an added accent on co-op play. Once again, the game takes place in Black Mesa, only this time, we didn’t get a new protagonist, we got two.ĭecay was envisioned as a cooperative multiplayer experience, putting the player in the shoes of two Black Mesa scientists: Colette Green and Gina Cross. The third and final Half-Life expansion, Decay, was an exciting entry in the franchise’s history. Half-Life was originally released for Windows in 1998, it was ported to the PlayStation 2 in 2001, and it was also brought to macOS and Linux in 2013. All of this comes together to form a very memorable gaming experience that holds up rather well even today. The game features many enemies, aliens and humans alike, and it features some platforming and puzzles as well. After an experiment goes wrong and the Black Mesa Research Facility is turned into a nightmare flooded with alien lifeforms, it’s up to Gordon to set things straight, which he does the classic FPS way - with an arsenal of big guns. The game put the player in the shoes of Gordon Freeman, the silent protagonist whom the player controls through the wholeness of the first game and most of the series. Sure, it may seem like nothing special in retrospect, but it truly stood out at the time since it featured great-looking 3D environments and placed a greater accent on storytelling than most FPS games of that time.

Platforms: Windows, PlayStation 2, Linux, macOSĭeveloped by Valve and released in 1998, the original Half-Life was quite something.

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