(click to blow WAYYY up)

Recently I made the admission that I had never actually played Half-Life 2 before, something that was a big drag on my credentials as a quasi-video game journalist.

I set out to rectify the situation and what I found a game that was not only expertly made, but also MASSIVE. These days we’re lucky if single player campaigns last more than five hours, so to sink almost fourteen into this one? It felt like an eternity. In a mostly good way.

Now I can see for myself exactly why it took so long to beat. This is every bit of the game, every sandy beach and winding corridor. The game is all interconnected as one fluid area (albeit populated by a lot of loading) and it’s really quite cool to see it all laid out in once place like this.