Half-Life 2: The Orange Box Review
Allow us to introduce you to the Xbox 360 version's slower yet still enjoyable cousin.
Posted by Chris Buffa on Tuesday, December 11, 2007
Half-Life 2: The Orange Box is a collection of five superb shooters value priced at $59.99. Valve blends its older games with newer content, delivering an essential bundle only a fool would ignore, unless said fool demands the best version. Although the PS3 edition is lots of fun, it runs noticeably slower than its Xbox 360 counterpart.
It starts with Half-Life 2. Despite its age, the game looks stunning, showcasing magnificent environments, rippling water, tons of action and the best physics of any console game. You don't just play it to find out what happens to its protagonist, Gordon Freeman or to kill things for the sake of slaughtering them. Most of the fun comes from experimentation, setting off chain reactions with exploding barrels, splintering wood, chopping zombies in half, skimming across the water in a hovercraft, squaring off against an attack chopper and chucking around large objects with the gravity gun. If you already played this on PC then great. There's nothing new to explore. But if you somehow missed this monumental achievement in gaming, you just won the lottery.
Half-Life 2's follow up, Episode One continues where its prequel left off. Once again, you step into Freeman's hazard suit and battle against the alien nemesis, the Combine. It's a short, 5-7 hour adventure, but you won't mind its abrupt conclusion, since you'll immediately segue into HL2's latest addition, Episode Two. During the course of this 10-12 hour adventure, you'll face countless enemies across a dangerous forest, fighting aliens topside and in the bowels of a dusty mine. Familiar weapons such as the shotgun, pistol, magnum and gravity gun return, along with a new vehicle and adversaries. Much like Episode One, it provides more Half-Life 2, which is in no way a bad thing, other than the fact that it doesn't finish the story, and Episode Three is probably a year from release.
Once you finish with those games, and that'll take anywhere from 30-40 hours, there's Portal, an impressive puzzle game that'll both amaze and frustrate you. Basically, you play as a test subject that, at the prompt of a sterile sounding voice with humorous dialogue, complete a series of challenges using a device that creates portals almost everywhere, allowing you to pass through walls and fall through floors. The effect looks just as stunning as in 2K Games' Prey, if not more so since you have greater freedom in a portals' placement. You'll spend the first few minutes marveling at the technology, especially as you watch your character walk through the portal and pop out the other side, which creates the illusion that you're right behind them, when in fact you're someplace else entirely.
Portal takes a great deal of concentration and will at times piss you off. Figuring out where to create the one portal that'll allow you to proceed may take you anywhere from a few minutes to an hour or more, but it's time well spent. Gamers may criticize it for being a tech demo (which is partially true-Valve intends to utilize this technology in future games, possibly the next Half-Life 2 Episode), but it has enough depth to stand on its own and complement The Orange Box's other games.
Finally, we come to Team Fortress 2, a sweet multiplayer only shooter simplistic in design and almost impossible to put down. When compared to other games such as Resistance: Fall of Man, TF2 comes up short in terms of options. Capture the Flag and Control Point offer little in the way of variety, and six maps seem laughable. But we love this game nonetheless. The brutal, fast paced gunplay sends enemies running and limbs flying, while the nine unique classes (Scout, Soldier, Pyro, Demoman, Heavy Weapons Guy, Engineer, Medic, Sniper and Spy) have signature abilities and weapons, making for lots of variety and experimentation. In addition, Valve did a masterful job with the graphics, creating gorgeous cell shaded maps that provide a slick comic book presentation that goes well with the mayhem. However, above all else, TF2 is a hell of a lot of fun. If you want to obsess over stats you can, but it's designed for those who need to see their rankings and those that just want to kill people.
As previously mentioned, the frame rate issues make the PS3 Orange Box less attractive than on Xbox 360. At times, the game slows to a crawl, though even at top speed, it takes a bit longer to turn than in the other version. It's a shame, considering the PS3 edition was delayed two months.
Obviously, the less experience you have with Half-Life 2, the more you'll enjoy The Orange Box. For veterans, the original and Episode One hold little value. But if you never played or finished those games, this is a must buy. Obviously, if you own an Xbox 360, you deserve to play that version over this one. Then again, if you don't and have never seen the game running on anything but a PS3, then you won't know what you're missing.
Final Score: 8/10
