>> Having struggled to complete HalfLife 2: Episodes 1 and 2 on the very 
>> lowest difficulty setting available, I'm not sure I want to know what 
>> it's like on Hard. :-/
> 
>   The final battle of Episode 2 is HARD. Really HARD. Even when you get
> the idea of what you have to do, it's still really hard.
> 
>   But it can be beaten.

Oh, I beat it eventually. It took about 2 months though.

It wouldn't surprise me if they released a game update to turn down the 
difficulty, and that's why I beat it. :-P

(I actually sent an email to Gab### [at] valvecom about it. Not that I 
suppose Gabe actually reads those...)

The car is... uncontrollable. It accelerates very slowly, yet hitting a 
twig or a pebble is sufficient to bring it to a complete halt. At top 
speed, it handles exactly the same way as in first gear (i.e., it will 
still make 90 degree turns without hesitation). In short, the physics 
are completely fschk'd up. The stearing controls are of course almost 
unusable

And then, we have hunters. They're wickedly manuverable, and every time 
you meet one earlier in the game, you have to almost exhaust your entire 
ammo supply to kill just ONE of them. But out here, you suddenly have 
dozens of the running around, AND NO AMMO ANYWHERE. (Sure, a few of the 
huts have tiny quantities of ammo. But once they've been blown to hell, 
that won't help you too much.)

The number of times I've tried to ram a hunter with the car, only for it 
to nimbly sidestep me at the last second is nobody's business. And then 
of course the car hits a pebble and comes to a total halt, and it takes 
10 minutes to execute a 2,000-point turn and get back on the move. 
Assuming you're not dead by this point from the multiple hunters and 
strikers attacking you.

On top of that, it's almost impossible to figure out where the hell the 
enemy is. And on top of THAT, to kill a strider you've got to select the 
gravity gun, pick up a bomb from somewhere, throw it, go through your 
inventory, select the pistol, aim at the strider... oh, wait, too slow. 
Sorry. Try again.

When I *finally* destroyed the last strider (which, by the way, was 
inches from the base at this point), everybody started cheering. I was 
so certain that there was going to be another wave... but, as it turns 
out, there wasn't.

Similarly, as they launched the missible, I was certain that a bunch of 
combine soldiers would suddenly jump out or something, or the G-Man pop 
up and say "I'm s-ssorrry Dave, I c-can't llet you dooo that..."

But no, it' launched, and it seemed to work. (Again I was half-expecting 
it to go wrong and teleport me and Alyx back to the Xen homeworld or 
something weird.)

And then... well, you've all seen it, right? ;-)

Post a reply to this message