One thing you can say about the team at Valve Software: they don’t like to rush. After taking six years to craft the sequel to Half-Life, it’s taken another eighteen months for the first mini-expansion, Half-Life 2: Episode One, to arrive. As the initial installment of a trilogy to be offered in episodic format, the good news is that Episode One is a welcome return to the world of Half-Life 2, with the same great graphics and gameplay that helped that game win numerous awards in late 2004 (including GameSpy’s PC Game of the Year).
Episode One starts off exactly where Half-Life 2 ended: with you (as scientist/killing machine Gordon Freeman) atop an exploding Citadel, with your sidekick, the spunky Alyx Vance, about to be toast. Without spoiling things, let’s just say that Alyx is kept out of harm’s way, and the two of you are quickly reunited outside at the base of a smoking Citadel. After establishing an uplink with old friends Dr. Kleiner and Alyx’s father Eli (once again voiced by Robert Guillaume), you discover the Citadel is about to go kerplooey, and in order to give yourself, Alyx and countless other citizens more time to escape City 17, you’ll have to go back in to try and delay the meltdown.
There’s a good deal of exposition at the start of Episode One, as characters are quickly reintroduced and tasks are laid out before you. The intro includes a reappearance by Dog (Alyx’s pet robot), who makes your re-entry into the Citadel a memorable one. Once inside, you and Alyx spend a lot of time exploring the deteriorating monolith, giving you a chance to get reacquainted with the gravity gun. Before long, you’ll be flinging around Combine soldiers just like the good ol’ days. As you work your way to the Citadel’s central reactor core, you’re confronted with a healthy dose of puzzles, which start out simple enough but require more imagination to solve as you proceed.
