- Title: The Orange Box
- Platform:Xbox 360
- Publisher: EA
- Developer: Valve
- ESRB Rating: “T” for Teen / “M” for Mature
- Genre: First-Person-Shooter
- Pros: Great value; Portal is amazing; Half-Life 2 is filled with great moments; nice visuals; great achievements
- Cons: Portal is very short; Team Fortress 2 only has 6 maps; core gameplay in Half-Life 2 is rather flawed (but still fun)
Portal
The puzzles you have to solve include doing things like moving crates around to hold down buttons, directing balls of energy into power outlets, and simply getting yourself from point A to point B. The game starts out fairly slow and easy, but by the end you have to be pretty clever in order to figure things out. The ramp up in difficulty makes the experience pretty satisfying, and figuring out how to get past a tough section is a great feeling. One significant thing that needs to be stated is that there isn’t just one way to solve each puzzle. A friend of mine played through the game while I watched, and on almost all of the harder levels he did them very differently than I did. Very cool.
And when you finish all 19 levels, which takes about 3 hours your first time through, you are rewarded with one of the greatest endings ever which makes it all worth it. Portal is a fun, funny, and altogether great game that is probably the best thing in The Orange Box.
Team Fortress 2
Team Fortress 2 is the other brand new experience found in The Orange Box. It is a class-based online team multiplayer game where teamwork and a knowledge of how every class of character works is vital to your success. You can choose from a scout, soldier, pyro, demo man, medic, engineer, sniper, or spy and each one has unique weapons and abilities. It can be tempting to try and just go balls out and try to play Rambo, but this is an objective-based game, not a deathmatch, so you have to play smart in order to be successful.When you find a good group to play with that understands how to work as a team and everyone understands how to use the different classes, Team Fortress 2 can be a very fun experience. Unfortunately, most of the people playing currently seem to want to play it like Halo rather than a heavily team focused game, which can be pretty frustrating when you are there to play the game the way it was meant to be played. You have to rely far too much on the other people in a match in order to really enjoy yourself, which is kind of off putting compared to other online games where you can jump in and have fun on your own.
The problem with having only six maps, and only one of them a CTF map, is that if you don’t like a gametype or you don’t like a particular map, you are pretty much screwed. Compared to Halo 3, which is insanely customizable and offers a ton of gametypes and maps, TF2 seems rather limited. It is fun when it all comes together, sure, but it is far from the best multiplayer experience on the Xbox 360. One other significant thing is that the game uses a cartoonish, over-the-top graphical style which really sets it apart from the realistic macho shooters on the 360. It definitely looks distinctive and is clean and nice looking, but it is all down to personal preference if you like it or not.
Review continued with Half-Life 2, Episode One and Two Review on Page 2 ...
