The Orange Box

PC and Xbox 360

By Jan Birkeland / Tuesday, January 29 2008

There areonly two possible reasons why you wouldn’t want to drop this magazine right now, and run out and pick up the Orange Box. One is that you already have it, and the other is that you have some sort of strange, clinical disorder which makes you allergic to the greatest things in life. 2007 has been a ridiculously good year when it comes to great game releases, and Valve has, perhaps, topped them all with the release of the Orange Box.

Like a TV infomercial, Valve gives you five great games for the price of one (six if you count the highly addictive mini-game Peggle Extreme); Half-Life 2 (HL2), HL2 Episode 1, HL2 Episode 2, Team Fortress 2 and Portal. This review will cover the last three games, as they are the newest additions to the franchise.

Half-Life 2, Episode 2

The original Half-Life game was responsible for evoking my lifelong love affair with first person shooters. Six years after the original, Half Life 2 took our breath away and in the years following, Valve has released episodic content for the popular shooter.

HL2 Episode 2 picks up the story where Episode 1 ended. We are reunited with our favourite bespectacled badass, Gordon Freeman, and his lovely sidekick Alyx. Emerging from a train wreck after destroying the citadel, the pair discover that the Combine (bad guys) are opening up a portal to bring more Combine troops in to (surprise, surprise) take over the earth.

Morgan and Alyx steal a transmission packet vital to the Combine, and Episode 2 follows the pair as they work their way towards a hidden rebel base to use the transmission against the Combine.

As we’ve come to expect from Valve, the storyline of Episode 2 is brilliant. The narrative is great, and the game leads you in the right direction without ever making it feel forced or too linear.

Built on Valve’s own Source Engine, the feel of the game is much the same as its predecessors. There is a solid focus on the engine’s physics ability, something you will discover in the puzzles as well as in the heat of the battle.

The graphics bring little that is new, but are impressive in their own right. Valve has focused on finally bringing our protagonists out of City 17, and its drab surroundings, and into the wilderness. As always, the sound is excellent and the soundtrack definitely helps set the mood.

My only gripe about Episode 2 is that it is a tad short. That being said, Valve is planning an Episode 3 and playing episodic content is often easier as it requires less continuous gaming time. You can expect to finish the episode in about four hours.

Team Fortress 2

Talk about a game that’s been in development forever! TF2 was announced to be in development in 1998, and has since gone through a multitude of changes as well as, at one point, disappearing off the radar completely. The original Team Fortress game was released as a mod for Quake, and later the original Half-Life.

TF2 is your basic, multiplayer team-based shooter. The game has two teams pitted against each other in different head-on maps, with different objectives. There is the classic capture-the-flag style of play, where players will gather a suitcase, or “intelligence”, from the opposing team. There’s also a control point mode, where an attacking team will try to overrun the defending team in order to control their territory.

The teams are limited to 24 players on the PC, equally distributed on both teams. The colours are the familiar red versus blue, and the classes on both sides are identical. TF2 has nine different classes, all with a unique ability and playing style. The graphics are not groundbreaking, but the design certainly is. Valve has given the game a cartoonish feel, and all the characters in the game have a cell-shaded look to them. This is a brilliant touch, and the developers have obviously focused on putting some humour into the game.

TF2 is already attracting a large group of gamers online, and there is great local support for the game. We have longed for this game for almost ten years and however much it pains me to say it, Team Fortress 2 was absolutely worth the wait.

Portal
Portal was really the dark horse of the Orange Box, as the game features something as unusual as a genuinely new concept in gaming. There was also little history to speak of, although the game was originally designed by a bunch of students now employed by Valve.

To say that Portal has made a sizable impact on the gaming industry is probably an understatement. What looked like a quirky add-on game acting as filler in the Orange Box has turned into the real draw card of the box set.

Portal essentially invents the first person puzzle game. The player controls two portals with a portal gun, creating a link between the two. Shoot one in the ceiling above you, and one in the floor below you, and you will be forever falling. The plot behind the game becomes evident when, as the main protagonist, you wake up in a lab, and a computerised voice instructs you to solve puzzles in order to free yourself.

Portal is the funniest game I’ve ever played; it literally had me in fits of laughter. I was extremely impressed with its innovative gameplay and the only letdown is that it is relatively short (about 4 hour’s gameplay). Don’t for a second think you’ve seen the last of Portal, and always remember: the cake is a lie.