Nog een Half-Life review...

Ook PC.IGN heeft een review van Half-Life. Hier de intro:

ou've got to hand it to these guys. Valve Software is a start-up, a relative unknown, with no track and, really, no business making such a mighty game. But mighty it is, the best single player shooter I've ever played.

It will be hard for some--mainly those who haven't played the game--to put their finger on exactly what everyone is raving about. There's nothing exceptional about the engine--it's a heavily modified version of Id Software's Quake. Its genre, the first-person shooter, has nearly been beaten to death. Its design couldn't be simpler: get some guns, run, shoot, jump; no laborious cutscenes or misplaced RPG elements here.

The weapons aren't spectacular either, just your usual array of realistic modern firearms and a few alien gadgets with some new twists. The creatures in some respects are fairly standard, and many of the levels have been done before. Taken separately, no particular element in Half-Life shines above the rest, nothing makes or breaks the game.

No, the real secret is that Half-Life is truly the sum of its parts. It takes every element in this oh-so-predictable genre, re-examines it, improves it, and then meshes it with the rest to create a constantly surprising, internally consistent, and always entertaining game.