Half-Life: Blue Shift Review

Valve couldn't have picked a better name for their much-acclaimed FPS game. No seriously, think about it: the half-life stage for radioactive materials can last for years (at least that's what they thought me in school), and I guess it is only fitting that Valve's "Half-Life" gets that name. The game has been around for three years now in one form or another, and it's still obviously far from fading away. Need I mention some of the numerous mods, TC's, or expansion packs: Counter-Strike, Day of Defeat, Gunman, Opposing Force, and now this - Half Life: Blue Shift.

As some of you know, Gearbox Software -- the same dev. studio that did the much-coveted Opposing Force expansion pack developed Blue Shift. Originally, the game wasn't supposed to come out on the PC at all. Instead, it was intended as a Dreamcast project. Hmm... on second though, maybe it was originally intended for the PC, and then Gbox decided to milk the Dreamcast crowd; but then when DC became cheaper than a groin-scratching drag queen, Sierra decided that it would be best to suggest to Gearbox to milk the PC consumers some more.

In any case, we're there - in the Black Mesa compound again. I think at the same time as Gordon, only instead of playing the super-shootin' scientist, players are cast in the role of a security guard Barney Calhoun who also gets to kill a whole lot of no-good soldiers and do all kinds of nasty stuff to slime-puking aliens. And those little crab-like thingies that just annoy the living crap out of me. In fact, I wanted to write an open letter to Valve and beg them to retroactively include a flame-thrower / auto-gun / chaingun with unlimited gas/ bullets in all of their games, so that I don't have to worry about the little bastards jumping on my face ever again.

That's about it as far as the basic concept of Blue Shift goes. Hopefully, it would've ended up on the Dreamcast and little console kids would've enjoyed the hell out of their shiny-new Half Life game (with their freaking joypad), but for us seasoned PC gamers, Blue Shift is about as refreshing as an "all-new flavor" of Coca-Cola. It's the same; it just tastes funny for about 5 minutes. And your teeth rot regardless, but that's not the right analogy.

The weapons will be mostly familiar to ya, and so will the levels, in a certain sense. You go through the compound, through sewers, and then you climb a narrow passage and voilla! - you're out there in the outdoor HL environments with soldiers shooting at you from every corner, exhibiting the same AI that we saw in the original game. SPOILER ALERT - after a while you even get teleported to the alien world (and I KNOW you didn't see that one coming). And as for the AI, if I didn't know any better, I'd say that the soldiers act stupider than in the original. They often look the other way -- and that wouldn't be much of a problem, if you weren't like 2ft away from them and starring at them.

The levels offer precious little variations from what you saw in the Opposing Force and the original game. The puzzles are your standard - "push-lever-break-thing-press-button" type of brain crackers, which will be about as challenging to a HL veteran as... well okay, some of them are somewhat inventive, but on aggregate they'd only be interesting to the DC crowd I guess.

What more is there to talk about? Oh yeah, the game will take you about four hours to finish, but at least it's a stand-alone product ($30). And you get some higher-res model packs that you can install (High Definition Pack). The models do look better, but we're still talking about the modified Quake 1 engine. I mean, no point in expecting too much from it in 2001.

The sound effects in the game work great. Blue Shift is abundant with rather authentic sfx, which are I guess, of a higher quality than what we heard in the Opposing Force or the original.

Being that Blue Shift was intended as a DC project the code is pretty damn polished, and it's boosting some major frames at max settings. Of course, one would expect that from a game that has been around since 1998. Hell, Clinton was in power back then.