Any means is good to get noticed, and by releasing The Orange Box on PlayStation 3, Valve had the good idea to play the opposite card. For some time, the games end in a handful of hours? The Orange Box offers at least a good twenty! Halo 3 had a clear focus on multiplayer. The Orange Box seems to have been primarily interested in solo players. But enough talk, let's see what it contains, this orange box!
Il était une fois ...
The FPS fest begins with this welcome reissue of Half-Life 2, released on PC three years ago, then adapted a year later on Xbox. We therefore find the hero of the first part, Gordon Freeman, with his jumpsuit and trendy glasses. Long story short, a screwed up science experiment had put a hell of a box on the Black Mesa facility, and Freeman had found himself right in the middle of it all. Half-Life 2 starts on a train, we don't really know what we are doing there, but when we arrive at the station, we quickly realize that we are in a totalitarian society with the Police everywhere, giant screens broadcasting the good word of a guru and everything. To top it off, strange creatures roam the streets of City 17 where our hero has just arrived. In short, it starts well! Fortunately, an old friend from Black Mesa, Barney, disguised as a guard allows him to escape to end up finding himself one of the centerpieces of the resistance to the Cartel, the mysterious organization in power. All this is therefore a nice pretext to make Gordon live through hell for fourteen exciting chapters. Because Half-Life 2 is unique in that it mixes very dynamic action scenes and highly scripted sequences with disconcerting ease through interactive cinematics. So like the mythical introductory sequence of the first episode, the game never takes the risk of losing your attention by always leaving you in control, even if it's just to watch people chat without actively participating in the dialogues. To this must be added a progression that is certainly linear, but continuous. No question of transporting you from one level to another, everything takes place continuously with a few loadings of course. As a result, despite its implicit division into chapters allowing very varied environments and gameplay, Half-Life 2 could almost be lived in one sitting! Could, because casually, the adventure lasts about fifteen hours (or more depending on the difficulty and your talent) and you have to sleep a little. But it's hard to put down the controller (or the mouse, it depends) once the adventure has started, a bit like it's hard to stop when you start watching a season of 24h Chrono on DVD, If you want...
Chapter One
Obviously, Half-Life 2 is three years old and shows its age a little. The textures are not of great finesse and we feel that we are not facing an ultra next gen engine which is stunning. Although at the time, it was really the top. Still, it's very pretty. The environments and game design are more complex, dare we say it, than those of a Halo 3, and therefore always impress. Especially since the management of physics remains quite modern, since thanks to the Gravity Gun, you can break and levitate many elements. Handy for grabbing a board and throwing it at the face of a guard, for example! And it's not a gadget feature, because the manipulation of objects will be the basis of puzzles, never very complex, however. In short, we already have a fairly beefy FPS, perhaps not technically sexy enough, but whose gameplay has nothing to envy to its recent comrades. Arrived at the end, we are already very happy, we had a great time but... when there's more, there's more!
Yes, at the end of this breathtaking adventure, questions remain unanswered and to tell the truth, we would take a little extra! So hop, direction this additional episode which allows us to extend the adventure by about five hours. It's certainly not a lot, but remember that this is more of an extension than a real sequel. We find the principle of its predecessor, with always the Gravity Gun, the suit equipped with a flashlight which allows Freeman to sprint and take damage, puzzles to solve to advance, very intense action scenes. On the other hand, more vehicle this time and a rather uneven pace but not too penalizing given the brevity of the epic. We will not dwell on the scenario (nor on that of theEpisode Two by the way) simply to avoid spoiling the players, probably many, who had not already finished Half-Life 2 on PC or Xbox before. Technically, we are already a little above the original, even if we remain completely in the same style. That said, we can still criticize this episode for not going very far in the narration: like some series, the questions are almost as numerous as the answers... At the same time, we couldn't expect to know EVERYTHING, it was necessary to keep a littleEpisode Two.
Verse Two
Here is finally the first new game of this Orange box, since its PC version comes out in parallel with this console version. We might as well warn you right away, there too we won't really know at the end. Does this mean that we can expect a Episode three ? Unless events find their outcome in a hypothetical Half-Life 3... Regardless, this time we feel that the engine has been worked on more with an achievement still a notch above and the rhythm problems have been resolved: this episode proves to be better balanced, more dynamic and sees the return of vehicles with a long car journey which certainly echoes that of Half-Life 2, but still turns out to be incredibly trippy! We never get bored for a second, despite a gameplay that ultimately does not really evolve. Here too, it takes five to six hours to see the end of it: a lifespan that would be shocking in another context, but quite correct in the context of theOrange box. So much for the part Half-Life, Valve could have stopped there, but the rascals still have a very nice surprise...
At the end, there is the Portal
Of the five games offered, it is undoubtedly the least attractive at the base since, inevitably, its name does not tell us anything. At best, if we have seen a few images before, we expect a nice little game, a bonus without ambition. And yet, Portal is certainly the small revolution of the pack, nothing less. Its concept is very simple: armed with a gun capable of creating on certain surfaces two portals communicating with each other, you must manage to reach the end of each level. Knowing that the more it goes, the more complicated it gets: traps, mechanisms to activate, well twisted architecture, automatic machine guns... To make it more meaningful, imagine a very simple example: a large room where you start at the bottom, and must reach the exit located at the end of a platform far too high to reach by jumping. Solution: create a portal on the ground in front of you, for example, then a second on the ceiling above the platform. Jump into the first one, you've reached the top! You are probably beginning to see all the possibilities of such a system! It's very simple, in terms of game design, Portal is a little gem, we can imagine the headaches of the developers to create levels for us taking maximum advantage of this innovative concept... So graphically, it's deliberately very refined, don't expect retinal detachment, it's a little gem. is made of simple shapes and sober textures. But for once, we have absolutely nothing to do so we are captivated by this gameplay never seen. And above all, the developers have added a robotic voice that is supposed to guide you, and promises you a big fat cake as the ultimate reward. As we go on, she gets more and more pissed off and doesn't seem as friendly as she looks. And there, no question of remaining serious, his interventions are sometimes hilarious, especially since the French voice chosen is very successful. You also have to count on the hilarious comments of the turrets (yes, yes, they talk). I also strongly recommend that you stay in front of the final credits, it's really worth it! At the end, we really say to ourselves that the creators of Portal certainly must not have smoked only tobacco to lay such a UFO on us!
Don't expect ten hours of headaches, you go around the levels for the first time in a couple of hours, before you can tackle bonus and timed levels to prolong the pleasure a little. So again, sold alone, we would cry foul, but integrated in such a pack, we can just feel frustrated not to have more puzzles! Moreover, with hindsight, Portal seems more like a first try, a kind of lab intended to familiarize us with this new concept. We imagine without difficulty, and above all we hope!, that Valve will reuse the gameplay either in this same system of big puzzle-game, or by integrating it squarely within a future FPS. You'll see when you've played it, at this idea, you feel like a slight shiver, it's so promising... Well, for the moment, we've had a lot of fun, we've had the quality and the quantity, but it's something is still missing... multiplayer. It's going pretty well, Team Fortress 2 is here for just that!
Storming the Fortress
So behind Team Fortress 2 hides in reality a long story, a very long story. You should indeed know that it was originally announced in 1999 and displayed a very serious, very first degree graphic style. Finally, eight years later, the baby finally comes out and no longer has much to do with the original project! A simple glance at the screenshots, and you will see that it has adopted a very cartoon style and therefore a much less austere atmosphere. To sum up, you play as a team (up to eight players) on maps offering either capture of the flag, in this case a briefcase, or capture of areas or control points. The interest does not lie so much in the principle, quite basic, but in the fact that you have the choice among nine character classes, as in the first Team Fortress Besides. You can for example embody a scout, fast and able to do a double jump, ideal for quickly grabbing a briefcase for example, but who will not last long in combat. There is a machine gunner, a sniper, a doctor (all players can call him by clicking on the right stick, it's up to him to quickly find them to administer treatment to them), a spy (who can become invisible momentarily and better, disguise themselves as any enemy character!), an engineer (who can place turrets, among other things), a soldier equipped with a rocket launcher... So, to put a maximum of chances on their side, players on the same team have every interest in consulting each other to distribute roles and optimize their abilities.
And if the game was designed to be very accessible (simple controls, explanations of the rules before the start of a game, etc.), Team Fortress 2 can become much more subtle as long as you communicate with your teammates. So it's very fun, but alas, it's a bit short. Indeed, six maps (knowing in addition that we play on each in each game with the same rules), it's a bit light... We would also have liked more variety in the modes. For once, the game may be very nice, it also seems to be the multiplayer alibi of theOrange box. If we can't help rejoicing that for once, to spend more than 8 or 10 hours on the same game, we don't have to call friends, we have to admit that we don't wouldn't have been against a stronger multiplayer game, either via a Team Fortress 2 richer, or downright with a mode based on Half-Life, or even Portal (re-trembling of happiness at this idea). Or simpler, by adapting the Counter-Strike Source which was supplied with Half-Life 2 on PC.
