Half-Life

In Half-Life you play as the young research engineer Gordon Freeman who works at the testing facility Black Mesa, located miles beneath some desert. The game starts with that you should get down to the test lab and help a few senior scientists with a lab experiment, unfortunately (or maybe fortunately otherwise it would be a boring game) something goes wrong and suddenly the whole place is crawling with aliens of various forms. You quickly realize that you need to get out of their and so starts your quest of reaching the surface again.

On your journey to the surface you will meet many scientists and guards that can be of great of help in your quest to stay alive. You can go and talk with any scientists and guards you meet. They may give you clues on what you need to do next or give you information about what happened. You will soon learn that the government sent soldiers to clean out all evidence on what happened and that includes you too. You can also tell a guard to come a long and he will help you until he gets killed or for some reason can't follow you. The scientists are usually too afraid to follow you far and they won't be able to help you kill aliens or the soldiers but at some occasions you need to lead a scientist to a door so he can open it for you. If you fail to keep him alive you may not be able to finish the mission.

The aliens set the mode of the game and keep you on your toes all the time crawling around in the corners for sudden attacks, so it's important to keep both your eyes and ears open at all time. Most of the aliens aren’t that clever though so you usually can take them out with not too much trouble. The soldier on the other hand often hides around the corners waiting to take you down. They also communicate with each other over radios that you can often overhear. Usually you hear things like go get him but it can also be messages that give you some clues about their mission.

At later stages of the game the military will decide to send in assassins, and those are one of the most deadly enemies I ever met. They are quick and almost invisible and silent. You will have great use of your soundcard to know where the arrows come from and here their footsteps when they run away.

What really makes Half-Life a more story driven action game than any other game is that all dialogs are interactive, there are no movie clips. You can always walk away from a dialog and an alien or soldier can suddenly appear and either kills the scientist you talk to or make him run away in panic. If the scientist is still alive when you killed the alien interfering with your discussion you can always continue talking to the scientist. It's also common you will have the opportunity to help a scientist being attacked by an alien or just watching how a few soldiers fight some aliens. You will also be able to watch how aliens eats the guards, soldiers and scientists and see scientists running for their life chased by aliens or soldiers.