The Orange Box Review

I'm very late to the Half Life 2 party, and I'm glad I showed up. This game is a ton of fun, Orange Box includes Half Life 2 with Episode 1 & 2, as well as Portal and Team Fortress 2. So to keep things clean I will review one at a time (the ones I played that is)

>>>Half Life 2/ Episode 1/ Episode 2 (these are all the same gameplay just contiuations of the story)<<<

You start this game off running, literally, you're thrown into the mix of getting attacked by guys with funky masks and people with crab monsters on their heads, its awesome. So lets get down to the things that matter most like gameplay, difficulty, replay value, graphics, audio, and dialog.

Gameplay: This is a FPS (first person shooter) so you have the typical layout where you have your health, which in this case is in the lower left hand corner of your screen, as well as your ammo count and all your other item bars in the lower left hand portion of your screen (flash light meter, AUX suit meter, etc) You can run, jump, and interact with your environment in this game, its very open and lets you move and utilize most of your surroundings, which makes the game that more fun and realistic to play. One downside to this is that there can be times where you get caught in a glitch and may even get stuck (this happend to me many times when driving the cars in the game). Switching between weapons is made easy where you can go from your 0 point gravity gun to a fire arm in no time this makes dicey situations go a little more smoothly.

Difficulty: If your new to FPS games this will be a fun one to play and will probably get you hooked on the genre. I thought the game was more towards the Hard difficulty level than most games out today. Ammo management was the main reason for that not necessarily the strength of the enemies in the game. Puzzles weren't that hard to figure out and would almost unfold for you just by rolling with the flow of the game, I played the games through on the Normal difficulty setting I'm sure Hard difficulty would be quite the challenge - I really prefer to play these games on normal since the harder difficulties can make the game tedious

Replay Value: After all is said and done you probably won't want to go back and replay these suckers, only because the epic journey is done, you had your fill there is nothing left to do except walk away and wait for the dawn of a new day. Yeah basically you play this through once you will be good to go -- I strongly recommend playing them in order and playing them all the story is good and fun to read and get into

Dialog: The in-game dialog is great, the computer charaters aren't annoying and don't continually bother you to do tasks or go places. Generally they run with you where ever you go usually getting in your way in doorways and halls and don't say much. The voice actors do a good job conveying feelings in characters which make the overall game experience seem like your playing out a movie

Graphics: Understand this was made for PC's years before it was released on the PS3 yet it has some awesome settings and great details, goes to show how ahead of its time it was when it came out. I liked the graphics even if they weren't the best, retro is how I roll

Audio: According to the box this isn't any special audio encoding which is a bummer, I would have liked Dolby Digital Pro Logic II for this one since it woulda sounded sexy on my 5.1 setup, but I have a faux 5.1 audio setting on my receiver that did just fine sending surround effects to my back speakers

So Overall this game lived up to its PC hype - the port over to the PS3 wasn't bad at all but nothing beats using a mouse and keyboard to play these kinda games I still enjoyed it

>>>Portal<<<

I'm not going indepth on this game since it has the same graphics/audio/dialog quailties as HL2

Gameplay: You have a portal shooting gun and its basically a gravity gun with portal making powers - you go in a blue portal you pop out the orange one you made - the game bases all the puzzles off this concept

Difficulty: This one can be difficult for some people - I beat the whole game in one sitting - took about 5-6 hrs but there were some tricky puzzles in this and I died numerous times

Overall this game was fun as well but I wouldn't go back and play it again - its kinda like making a 5000 piece puzzle and breaking it apart and starting over not really too fun to do that

In the end you should pick this one up - I recommend getting it used for $20 thats what I did my copy worked fine and gave me $20 worth of enjoyment

Have fun and happy gamingGet more detail about The Orange Box.