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Half-Life 2: Episode Two

New candy and old leftovers

As the Source engine has continued to evolved since the original Half-Life 2, Episode Two includes some new eye candy to go with the usual visuals. On the other hand, a lot of the textures and models are exactly same as in the first release, and the oldest bits are starting to show their age. It's not that Episode Two is ugly - it looks perfectly fine - but you can't avoid noticing that some portions of the game are re-using three year old assets. It's both gift and a curse of episodic development. You get to build on your previous assets, saving time, but it also means you can't touch up the visual quality of the new additions too much, or all the old stuff would stand out like a sore thumb. Episode Two is walking on a fine line here, and presents surprisingly good mixture of old and new combined to present a new story - some of the old stuff could've used a makeover though.

I guess this counts as an "open area" for play, as it has more than one route.

Some fights are slightly more challenging, but most of the time you are wading in the usual pile of bugs and zombies.

The thing that has advanced the most is the scripting of the game world - it's clear that the familiarity of the engine and the development tools has helped here, and Episode Two feels much less artificial in the scripting of the actions triggered by your progress. It just flows smoother while a level is in progress. The addition of physics to scripted events also creates some truly impressive sequences. Some rough spots remain, and the long loading pauses between sections are bit annoying, but I guess it can't be helped - the engine just isn't set up for constant streaming of content. Puzzles, while fairly rare and sometimes optional, are also exceptionally well done - not immediately obvious, yet not so hard as you'd have to alt-tab for a solution off a spoiler site to proceed.

Everything minimized - runs great on YouGamers minimum system.

Everything set to Medium.

Hardware requirements haven't changed much from the original Half-Life 2. The minimum has gone up a bit, but it was pretty low to start with. Episode Two frame rates can dip a bit on the listed YouGamers recommended system at maximum settings, but it doesn't really affect the gameplay, as you can keep up with the action perfectly fine at 20-30fps (or remove some of the extra visual candy, if you so prefer).

Page 1: IntroductionPage 2: Story and GameplayPage 3: Visuals and PerformancePage 4: Final thoughts & Scores

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