I am no stranger to Half-Life. It’s one of the first PC games I played, and one I come back to every year. Most of the time it’s through Sven Coop with some friends, but recently I’ve been playing it on different platforms and through different devices. I tried out the Dreamcast Beta build and it surprisingly plays great, but since the saves don’t work, I didn’t want to put myself through that just to see where the game stops. I, instead, decided to tackle the game on Steam Deck, something I’ve been meaning to do since they released the anniversary update, and I definitely have some things to say about it.
First off, the game runs great. As it should. It’s a 1998 release that hasn’t changed (much) since its initial release. With official thumbstick support now, the movement was smooth and natural. I didn’t have to adjust many settings off the bat as everything seemed to just work. Insert Apple joke here.
I went through the standard motions: Hop off the tram, jump around Barney, press the big red button, and threw on my HEV suit. Everything was the same and exactly how I remember it, but it felt new to me on this giant Game Boy with thumbsticks. I used the default button layout, and I have to say having A as jump and B as crouch was a perfect setup for crouch and long jumping. You could also click in the left stick to toggle crouch for the vent sections, in case you were wondering. You weren’t.
After not only seeing a Resonance Cascade but also creating one, I made my way through the lab. As one does. I picked up the crowbar and continued on. Everything was perfect. Maybe not for those elevator occupants, but I digress. I bashed in a few headcrab zombie skulls and finally picked up the pistol. Of course it was the one on the ground. Did you think I killed the security guard for his sidearm? I’m not a monster, I’m a Theoretical Physicist for Christ’s sake! However, this is where the game started to fall apart for me.
I’ve played a lot of shooters, both on PC and console, over the last two decades and if there’s one thing that console shooters do well it’s aim assist. Halo, a game released in 2001, does it pretty much perfectly. Not too much, but just enough to make you think you’re doing it by yourself if you’re not paying attention. Half-Life also includes an aim assist functionality that is enabled by default when you first install the game. It’s generally the first setting to disabled after installing, mainly because when using a mouse and having auto-aim toggled on things can get pretty nauseating. This was, however, not the first time I had installed the game. I had disabled auto-aim many, many years ago. I guess Steam carries over that setting even when installing it onto the Steam Deck. Go figure.
Every shot I took was embarrassing. I immediately enabled auto-aim in the settings and tried again. This time it was much easier to dispatch enemies. This worked a little too well to the point where I wasn’t feeling like I was the one doing the aiming, but instead I was just running into a room and having the auto-aim feature do the rest. I just had to point in the enemy’s general direction and pull the trigger. This continued throughout the entirety of the game, and it felt empty. Although I did find it interesting that it also locked onto friendly NPCs. I feel like they’re trying to tell me something with that.
I’m not going to get deep into my review of the story, environments, music, or other aspects of Half-Life. It’s a fantastic game that (mostly) holds up in 2024. It runs on anything nowadays and is still just a few hundred megabytes. If you’re disinterested in the archaic graphics and less-than-stellar vent sections then I would recommend playing Black Mesa, a fan-made remake that does the original game justice and then some.
I did try disabling auto-aim in some sections to see how I would hold up after having played for a while, but it was abysmal. Auto-aim stays on, and now I just have to go through the motions. Sure enough, I completed the game, hopped in the portal after kissing the G-Man goodbye, and the credits rolled. Another playthrough of Half-Life done, this time without feeling.
