"Wake up and smell the ashes."

Since the days of Black Mesa the world has changed significantly to say the least. The face of the world is drastically different, with the human race herded into cities ruled by the Combine, a sort of dictatorship led by your old boss Dr. Breen, and the deserted wastelands between have become home to a multitude of alien species, the most notorious of which are the infamous headcrabs and their manipulated hosts.

You, Gordon Freeman, have been placed onto a train arriving in City 17 by the mysterious G-Man for reasons unknown. As you leave the train terminal the Civil Protection stop you and flick on their stun batons, one steps through a door and orders you to follow him and as you do, you catch a glimpse of a civilian strapped to a chair and you're led into one of the interrogation rooms, the kind with disturbing blood stains.

The Civil Protection Officer turns the cameras off, which is generally never a good sign, before revealing himself as your old friend Barney Calhoun, who immediately contacts your old work associate Dr. Kleiner, now running an underground railroad to the old Black Mesa East compound where the resistance is held up. There's a sudden heavy knocking on the door and Barney kicks you out back to escape from the CPs without a weapon to fight with - not even your trusty crowbar!

For me this is where the problems started; there's nothing wrong with the actual gameplay mind you, but the areas are large and that's a good thing, yet it takes a fair time to load them, about two or three minutes and you only spend about a minute passing through them. In a generation that has an attention span rivalling a goldfish, which is either infinitely long or about three seconds (I'm guessing the latter) you'd think that game developers would try and reduce load times from the fear that people may one again, dare I say it, read a book! [Sounds like you need a magazine to hand for this game! Ed]

Between these despair inducing load times you'll discover excellent puzzles that use the stunning physics engine to great effect. These include many uses of gravity, where you weight down seesaw like planks to get over gaps and my personal favourite of using the buoyancy of air filled plastic barrels to support a broken bridge and allow your riverboat to jump across. The most challenging of these puzzles is when you're pitting your timing skills against a Hunter Chopper equipped with a high power plasma rifle.

As you progress into the latter half of the third chapter, when you get the H&K MP-7 PDW submachine gun, you'll find the load times become insignificant compared with the amount of action going on. The manhacks are awful for getting your heart going, because your beast weapon against them is the crowbar and they're a flying circular saw, which is a kind of an unfair advantage to them. Then there are your old buddies the headcrabs and zombies that just come out of nowhere to take a bite out of you or just scare the life out of you. What is cool, is that the Combine launch missiles full of headcrabs but by that time you have the SMG and the pistol is the only necessary weapon against them, as two well places shots can easily take them out. It is good to make note that they always come in threes, so if you see one of the missiles there will, and I stress will, be three headcrabs or zombies running around. Oh and if you can't find the third, then prepare to jump!

The peak of jumpiness is Ravenholm, which is a playground for the gravity gun (Zero-Point Energy Field Manipulator) with lots of zombies and pointy things that you can throw at them and it doesn't seem that scary, well that's true zombies are slow, right? Yeah, except for the really fast mutant ones that can jump across several building tops in one leap and can both take and give quite a punch! Ravenholm comes after your visit to Black Mesa East, where you meet up with your old work colleagues. Dr Eli Vance and his daughter Alyx, Dr Judith Mossman and the dog who you get to play catch with - although it's a game of catch with barrels and dog is a multi-ton robot with his own more powerful version of the gravity gun and enough brute force to move almost anything.

To avoid telling the whole and most important parts of the story, although I'd love to, let me just say that Half-Life 2 has the best story in a first person shooter since, well, either the original Half-Life or Halo, but then again those are the only first person shooters with an actual story worth your time! The story is the most engrossing story I've ever come across in a game and you'll find yourself reading the newspaper cuttings up on walls just to find out more about what's going on.

There is also masses of humour added into the game - for example when you first meet Alyx she says, "Man of few words, aren't you," after she asks you a question. My favourite line is after Alyx gets teleported by Dr Kleiner to Black Mesa East, with a small helping hand from yourself. Barney commends you with this line, "Good work flipping that switch, Gordon. Gee, I see that MIT education pays for itself." Now this is not at all crucial to the story, but it helps give the game an unbeatable movie feeling and pokes fun at itself very well, but without an annoying person sat in front of you. Just don't put the popcorn in your lap, unless you like cleaning up a mess!

Half-Life 2 is possibly the most revolutionary FPS since they went fully 3D way back in the Nineties. What makes it revolutionary is lifelike graphics similar to what's possible in Hollywood and is in no doubt better than a lot of the computer graphics used in movies; the characters are in no way photo-realistic, but I suspect games will never have characters that look like real people. The environments however have succeeded in matching photo-realism in their standards, which is no doubt due to the physics employed in the game, down to the smallest detail, like telephone wires that are no longer perfectly ridged.

These environments incorporate City 17, a derelict city slowly being consumed by the ever expanding citadel. Ravenholm is the first place object physics become effective, as you're wielding the gravity gun. This means that you have lots of sharp objects like buzzsaw blades to fire through packs of zombies. My favourite area is the beaches that are inhabited by the ant lions, which live underground and listen for the movement of people on the sand above; it gives me the nostalgic feel of the sandworms in Frank Herbert's Dune and is no doubt an homage to him, as the Combine forces keep them away with objects resembling thumpers.

The physics aren't only applied to the environment; to supplement the graphics, every character model is given a skeleton and muscles to control their movement and expressions making movement realistic and smooth. The weapons use physics in their bullet fire, which is more confined to the mods like Counter-Strike, but they're used in the grenade bounces and, one of my personal favourites, the plasma rifle's energy grenade that bounces around rooms like a high power bouncy ball until it hits someone and explodes throwing the unlucky victim and companions through the air, leaving them sprawled out on the edges of crates and desks.

The weapon that uses the physics engine the most is the gravity gun, which can push or pull most objects, giving the ability to pick up radiators to deflect bullet fire, great when advancing on a gun turret, or just beating someone to death with blunt objects and that probably forms the most entertaining portion of the game. The heavier the object, the more damage it does, but the weaker the effect the gravity gun has, so you can't pick up a car or a dumpster and drop it on someone's head.

The sound in the game does help the movie feel, but I have to say that the best use of music is where they leave it out. In movies you get the cliché music that is nearly as effective at telling you where a scary bit is as putting a big sign up with the words 'SCARY BIT' plastered over it. It's crawling through a dimly lit passageway with no music and no sound except for the short-circuiting radio and then WHAM! The game stutters because it decides to load from the DVD drive and the hard drive at the same time, as it tries to simultaneously load a dozen sounds. Nothing kills the suspense like that, I guarantee it.

The final part of the game to give a movie feel is the character graphics. The most detailed of all has to be the G-Man, who has eye bags, possibly a side effect of manipulating time and travelling across dimensions and deep set wrinkles. The next most detailed characters are Eli and your ex-employer and now Combine leader Dr Breen, who's gone down in the world, mostly because of all the wrinkles and beards that look almost photorealistic. The women, Alyx and Mossman, are smooth skinned and curvy, while looking realistic and I can't imagine the modellers having that much to do than tweak dimensions to make them look, ahem, 'authentic'.

Unlike most FPS games, Half-Life 2 defies my multiplayer rule, this being that the multiplayer is tacked poorly onto the single player or vice versa. The game comes with Half-Life 2: Deathmatch, which can involve killing each other with toilets, which is amusing to say the least and 'the world's #1 online action game' Counter-Strike: Source. The quality of these games depends greatly on the servers you play on.

There is a multitude of fan made modifications around, including full games, my personal favourite is Battlegrounds 2, as it's set in the United States' fight for independence and there's nothing like messaging someone saying, "How dare you shoot at us at high tea!" It also doesn't have the Counter-Strike problem of campers, as there are no sniper rifles and the process of sniping requires skill, precision and compensating for both player movement and the dip of the bullet, quite a feat compared to buying a high power rifle and shooting people through doors! There are also bayonets and there's nothing like leading a charge to try and impale the enemy. The newly released Game Of The Year Edition also features the original Half-Life single player game, Half-Life: Source, and two of the most popular online games, Half-Life 2: Deathmatch and Counter-Strike: Source, which comprise nice bonus content for those of you yet to pick this up, but isn't worth the price tag for those that already have the game.

Half-Life 2 is a groundbreaking first person shooter that is every bit as innovative and entertaining as the original, with astounding graphics, fantastic use of sound and a story that compels you to follow through to the very end. The long load times are the only negative point, but once in Ravenholm you'll appreciate the loading times, as they stop you having a stroke! Even if you're not a running and shooting kind of person, this is still a must have game and it may even convert you to the genre.

Reviewed by Nik Gregory for AceGamez (All Rights Reserved).