My Rating: 10 / 10

    In Half-Life 2, you play as Gordon Freeman, a theoretical physicist formerly employed by an underground research facility known as Black Mesa. Following the events that occurred in Black Mesa, Half-Life 2 picks up the story and takes it to a whole new level. After the resonance cascade was stopped by Freeman, a mysterious figure known as the G-Man appears and offers Freeman the illusion of free choice in a job offer. Freeman accepts and is put into stasis.

    Half-Life 2 begins with the G-Man pulling Gordon out of stasis with a dream-like vision recalling some of the events of the original game. Freeman is placed on a train heading to City 17, a European-styled city under the occupation of a multidimensional empire known as the Combine. With a real sense of suppression of the human species by alien enemies, Freeman is plunged into the underground resistance head-first and it becomes up to him once again to save the world from alien forces.

    The gameplay here is similar to Half-Life with the addition of a heavily-modified Havok physics engine which performs wonderfully. You'll enjoy using the gravity gun for many hours to send objects flying and watch them react realistically to the environment based on the laws of physics. While physics are pretty much a given with any game now, Half-Life 2 still has the best physics as far as I'm concerned.

    HL2's graphics are simply amazing, even by today's standards. Valve spent a little over ten years developing the Source engine, arguably the best written, most highly optimized game engine out there. A lot of game engines today contain so much junk code that you need a far better system than would otherwise be required to run the game. With the Source engine, you're guarenteed a game that looks and runs wonderfully, even on older systems. Half-Life 2 is the Source engine's flagship and the reason developers are still amazed by it today.

Half-Life 2 is still the best shooter I have ever played and it would take quite a lot to make me love any shooter more, with the exception of its numerous episodic sequels which extend the story and gameplay even further.