Every cool bit offered something new and most left us wanting more, even if the radical shifts did take away much of the original Half-Life’s thematic consistency. It was a game of smooth traversal around the maps, of combat bleeding into story, and each major section, most famously zombified Ravenholm, casually experimenting with the formula. That sense of flow is what really defined Half-Life 2-sequences bleeding into one another to create the feel of an unbroken journey (give or take a loading screen). She’d even climb and vault over things instead of simply walking around the old fashioned way, easier as that would have been to script. She could go directly from being your wing-woman to interacting with the world, from having conversations to fixing something, all as smoothly as Half-Life managed to never break perspective as you went from random lab geek to savior of two different worlds. She could smile, and have the smile go further than her lips. Alyx Vance for instance was an effective sidekick and a fun character, but it was her ability to make a connection with the player through things like eye contact that elevated her above her others-something shared by fellow Source engine game Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines, especially with characters like Jeanette and your pet ghoul Heather. What Half-Life 2 really brought to the industry wasn’t new ideas… though it absolutely had them… but demonstration after demonstration of how things both could and should be.
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