You’ll get to see some new enemies like zombified Combine soldiers and Stalkers and more of the Citadel, but the initial levels feel like “deleted scenes” from Valve’s original vision of HL2 rather than an important step forward for the franchise.Īfter delaying the core, Alyx and Gordon then need to try to escape the city by train, and this requires you weaving in and out of tunnels below the city (which you’ve done before) until finally providing cover for your fellow resistance members as they board the last trains out of City 17. Some scripted segments where you have to dodge debris or fall further into the maze of the Citadel beak up some tired “shoot the energy ball into the hole to extend the bridge” puzzles. The initial levels play similarly to the concluding levels of HL2, though now the entire Citadel is coming down around the player. In fact, both episodes can be seen as expensive remakes of certain chapters of HL2 without fundamentally adding anything new or revealing anything groundbreaking to the plot.Įpisode 1 sees Gordon and Alyx fight their way back through the Citadel in order to delay the core from exploding.
For those who thought Half-Life 2 was too short and resolved nothing, expect more of the same.
Half-Life 2: Episode 1 is the first chapter in a three-part story-arc set after the events of Half-Life 2.
