Rating: 
Summary: An aging game, yet still worth the buy!
Review: I just bought the game a few days ago, and I gotta be fair. This game was released in 1998, and it shows the age. The graphics are pretty pixely, there's no vehicle support and the voices sound like a low recording quality MP3.
But amazingly, this is the best game that I've ever played, and I've played a lot of games. This may be an old game, but it's incredibley well designed. Nothing is ever repetive in this game. As soon as you've gotten used to a certain type of enemy, situation, or weapon, the game throws something completly new and exciting at you. For a video game the story is great, the sound (except for the voices) is excellent and I assure that you'll completely forget the poor graphics because you'll be so emerged in the game universe. Before you buy try out the demo and you can see for yourself. Download the demo from a gaming site such as gamespot.com. I hope this helped you.
Rating: 
Summary: One less horror in the world.
Review: A modern classic, this is an finely-honed first person shooter with a compelling story, some excellent action set-pieces, great presentation, and a ground-breakingly perfect musical score. It reeks of quality, and stinks of class - the creators obviously cared about making a good game, and that simple fact sets 'Half-Life' apart from everything else. Now almost two years old, 'Half-Life' is still just as good as it was, and it could be released tomorrow and still make the same impact. It's an embarrassment of riches, with too many good things to count - in amongst the seemingly-intelligent soldiers, giant tentacles, amusingly jingoistic security guards and radioactive water the game almost off-handedly solves the problem of how to tell a story with a computer game - and it's extremely immersive. You really need to play it with headphones, or an expensive stereo. Everything from the plausible, gloomy environments, to the metallic chatter of your machine-pistol, fits the atmosphere perfectly, and there's a sparse, scary set of musical cues which mix ambient techno with noisemusic. It's even excellent fun as a multiplayer game, or even in related 'Team Fortress' form. It's rock-hard, too, but in a way that makes you want certain bits again and again. All told, it's a classic, and you should own it already (plus the mission pack).It's not perfect, though, although familiarity has no bred contempt. The narrative flow breaks down in the final, alien-bound levels, which are a disappointment after the recognisably real-world environments in the rest of the game. On the alien world there are a couple of places where you can be inextricably stuck, too, which seems unfair. Some of the creature designs don't seem to fit, either - whilst the mutated scientists and head-crabs are fantastically hateable, the hulking, wasp-firing alien 'sergeants' seem to belong to another game entirely. Play it in the dark, for the first time, and you'll be scared to death, too. It makes 'Blood 2' look amazingly, implausibly bad.
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