The Orange Box (Xbox 360)

Look inside The Orange Box...


The Orange Box is a rather ambiguous title for a game, giving very little clue as to the game's contents. If you have not heard of this game before, you might be surprised to find that it does not, to my knowledge, feature any actual orange boxes. What it does feature is an abundance of diverse quality content, spread over what is advertised as being five separate games for the normal retail price ...
...than enough to justify labelling The Orange Box the best deal in video game history. The first game is Half-Life 2, released in 2004, and widely considered one of the greatest PC games of all time. The next two titles are the follow-up expansion episodes, numbers 1 and 2, which I would group together as being the second game of three and a half. The third game is Team Fortress 2, a fast-paced, class-based online team shooter that goes for a rather ... more

Look inside The Orange Box...

The Orange Box is a rather ambiguous title for a game, giving very little clue as to the game's contents. If you have not heard of this game before, you might be surprised to find that it does not, to my knowledge, feature any actual orange boxes. What it does feature is an abundance of diverse quality content, spread over what is advertised as being five separate games for the normal retail price of a standard game. In fact, it is more like three and a half games, but this is more than enough to justify labelling The Orange Box the best deal in video game history. The first game is Half-Life 2, released in 2004, and widely considered one of the greatest PC games of all time. The next two titles are the follow-up expansion episodes, numbers 1 and 2, which I would group together as being the second game of three and a half. The third game is Team Fortress 2, a fast-paced, class-based online team shooter that goes for a rather novel graphical style. Rounding out the final half-game of the package is Portal, in which you solve puzzles at a research institute using a gun capable of creating portals which can be entered, in order to exit at the location of a different portal

Half-Life 2 + Episodes 1 and 2

The original Half-Life released in the late 1990s to fantastic critical acclaim, gaining a slate of Game of the Year awards. You played as Gordon Freeman, a scientist at the Black Mesa research facility, where a disastrous experiment resulted in alien beings invading earth from another dimension. Half-Life 2 follows on some years later down the line, with Freeman beginning the game on board a train to City 17. Earth has been over-run by a mysterious enemy known as the Combine, and humanity is now controlled by these mysterious oppressors. It doesn't take long for Freeman to link up with former colleagues who are now part of a rebellious underground movement working against the Combine. Over the course of Half-Life 2 and its additional pair of expansion episodes you will struggle in one long fight against the Combine and various other enemies, working towards the destruction of City 17 and the subsequent escape. You will experience all of the game's story through the eyes of Gordon Freeman, which makes the game truly immersive and convincing.

In terms of gameplay, Half-Life 2 is what you would expect from the first person shooter genre. The shooting gameplay is very solid and the AI is quite good, with more intelligent creatures such as Combine soldiers hurling grenades, dodging your grenades and falling back when faced with overwhelming force, whilst less intelligent enemies such as zombies lurch slowly in your direction, oblivious to danger. Your arsenal of weapons gradually increases, with the standard pistols and submachineguns being supplemented with more unusual weapons such as a crossbow, antlion pheromone pods and the gravity gun.

The latter are two of the more interesting weapons in the game. The pheromone pods allow you to direct a group of antlions, which introduces some squad-based gameplay. Antlions are flying insect-like creatures which will attack any targets in the vicinity of the pheromone pods, which you can launch like grenades into a group of enemies and watch as the antlions annihilate them. Squeezing the pheromone pod causes the antlions to regroup on your position. The weapon is only available to you during certain gameplay sequences, but it is interesting, nonetheless.

The gravity gun allows you to manipulate your environment and makes every object a weapon. Imagine you are fighting Combine security in a dilapidated prison block. See the toilet on that wall? The gravity gun can rip the toilet off the wall and then fire it back at your enemies at a considerable velocity. Using the toilet has never been so much fun! Any object in the world that is affected by physics can be picked up from a distance and turned into a deadly projectile weapon (less so in the case of flimsy card-board boxes).

Speaking of physics, Half-Life 2 has a highly sophisticated physics engine. Whilst this may sound a little on the boring side, it actually has a significant impact on gameplay. Objects have believable physical properties which greatly adds to the game's immersiveness. For example, if you stand on a plank of wood that is floating in a canal, it sinks to the bottom. Jump off the plank of wood and bobs back up to the surface. Such an advanced physics engine is quite uncommon in a game, and it allows for a variety of physics based puzzles to be littered throughout the game. You will find yourself, for example, looking for heavy objects such as cement bricks to weigh down one end of a plank of wood, which will conveniently turn about a pivot to make a ramp for you to progress to a higher level. Remove the heavy objects, and the plank will pivot back the other way due to the greater moment (turning force).

The game does feature a couple of long vehicular sequences, including one on a small hovercraft and a whole level called Highway 17 where you progress through the level in a go-kart type car with a turret. The driving controls are not particularly great and these vehicle sequences are perhaps the only monotonous parts of Half-Life 2.

In 2004, when Half-Life 2 was originally released on the PC, the graphics engine was stunning. Now, in late 2007, Valve Software's Source Engine is beginning to look a little dated, particularly in texture quality. Valve did a good job of revisiting the game and polishing the graphics, particularly with the addition of HDR (High Dynamic Range) Lighting, but the game does show its age at times. Despite this, the graphics are more than acceptable for an Xbox 360 game and still look quite nice. The water effects, in particular, are fantastic, and you will notice that the graphics improve slightly as you move from Half-Life 2 through to the more recent Episode 2.

In terms of length, Half-Life 2 and its additional episodes will probably last most people at least 25-30 hours, and quite possibly many more depending upon difficulty and the player's level of preference for proceeding slowly and absorbing the environment. Episode 1 is perhaps the weakest of the three (and the shortest), but overall they make for a fantastic and rewarding videogame experience, not to mention lengthy.

Team Fortress 2

At first glance, Team Fortress 2 is quite bizarre. It is as if the you've stepped into a cartoon warzone. Whilst most shooting games go for a super-realistic, gritty graphical style, Team Fortress 2 goes for the other extreme. The graphics are bright and colourful, making for a unique visual style.

The game itself is fast paced and chaotic. The basic premise is that two teams go head to head to achieve their conflicting objectives - there are no mindless team deathmatches here, although games do sometimes turn out that way if players ignore the objectives! There are only six maps at present, but each has its own game mode. One highly popular map, appropriately named 2fort, has traditional capture-the-flag gameplay with each team's intelligence (e.g. flag) entrenched deep within a highly defendable base with battlements, a flooded underground tunnel and an armoury for the defenders' usage only, as well as many easily defendable chokepoints. Most other maps involve an attack and defend variant. Sometimes one team has to hold out against a timer whilst an attacking team tries to capture their territory, whereas other maps have both times vying for territory in an attempt to hold all control points on the map.

The objective based game types really help to focus the fighting, which, like the cartoon-style visuals, is ridiculously over-the-top. There are nine classes to pick from, and you can choose at any time to respawn as a different one. It says something about the crazy way this game plays that the standard Soldier class spawns with a rocket launcher and a shotgun ... always extremely powerful weapons in any game. Then there is the Heavy, a man mountain with nearly three times as much health as some classes and a giant minigun. The fragile Scout moves at ridiculous speed and can double jump in the air, whilst the Pyro is equipped with a short range flamethrower to incinerate enemies. No shooting game would be complete without a Sniper, who's trademark sniper rifle does more damage the longer the scope is kept on. The Demoman has a grenade launcher and proximity mines, and the Engineer can build automatic sentry guns, ammo dispensers and teleporters for his team. The Medic is able to heal others and after a period of extended healing can activate temporary invincibility for himself and one other team-mate. Rounding out the classes is the intriguing Spy, who can disguise as any class on either teams, but is weak and has little in the way of offensive weapons except for a weak pistol and a knife. Playing as a Spy involves a great deal of acting as you have to disguise as an enemy and use your acting skills to convince enemies that you are on their team, only to stab them in the back once they let their guard down.

Despite all these crazy weapons and abilities the game is incredibly well balanced. The Heavy might be unbeatable in a direct assault but he is slow, unable to move at more than a crawl when he is firing his huge machine gun, making him an easy target. The Scout's movement speed is incredible, but has to keep moving due to a major lack of hitpoints. The Sniper might do massive damage if he stays in his scope and charges up his rifle's damage, but this makes him blind to his surroundings and he has almost no capacity to fight at short range.

There is great potential for teamwork, as you would expect from a game called Team Fortress 2. Some classes complement each other brilliantly, and where you might fail on your own you can be unbeatable in groups. For example, the slow moving Heavy is an easy target, but with the Medic's invinicibility power active on the Heavy, he can take out an entire team in the ten seconds or so of invincibility the Medic can provide. This might sound unbalanced, but the Medic has survive and heal teammates for well over a minute to unleash this power, and in a game as fast paced and lethal as this one, staying alive for that long just for ten seconds of invincibility is no mean feat and the power is nowhere near gamebreaking.

Team Fortress 2 might not be groundbreaking, and it might not have the photo-realistic graphics, but it is a great game. It doesn't try to be the number one online first person shooter (it's online or system link only, just to clarify), but it aims to be a wildly fun game and delivers this in spades. It does have slight issues, however. At the moment there seems to be a bug with the netcode that means getting in games with more than 10 players or so is difficult due to lag, and there are only six maps. However, Valve is a highly customer oriented company and they are already working on patches. You can depend on them to update their games - they released Counter-Strike Source in 2004 and updates (including new maps) have been released for it regularly all the way into 2007.

Portal

Portal is probably the most original component of The Orange Box. It's more of a concept demo than actual fully featured game, but it's well worth playing through. You are a test subject at the Aperture Science Research Laboratory and you are apparently one of a number of people who have volunteered to test out Aperture Science's newest invention, the Portal Gun. The aforementioned gadget can fire a blue and an orange portal, but only one of each colour can exist at each time. Upon entering one portal, you exit the other. Your momentum is conserved through portals, so if you fire the blue and orange portals onto the floor next to each other and then fall from a great height into the blue one, you will come up out of the orange portal and be launched into the air. The game involves you progressing through a series of test chambers, having to solve a puzzle in each one to reach the exit. Whilst the majority are fairly easy, the last few are more complex, and once you complete Portal you unlock some advanced challenges that add replay value and up the difficulty. Still, you will probably get the least mileage from Portal out of all of The Orange Box's components, but its a fun and original experience, if somewhat brief.

Closing Verdict

The Orange Box is a phenomenal game that offers incredible value for money. Half-Life 2, whilst looking slightly dated, is top quality and all gamers will be able to appreciate it. Team Fortress 2 is great fun and whilst there are some issues with lag, its not all that hard to find a good lag-free game. The shortage of maps is definitely an issue but as stated in the main body of the review, Valve is dedicated to patching and releasing new content. Portal is a unique game and whilst very short, it is a pleasing addition to a package that already offers much more quality content than almost any other on the market. The Orange Box should be a definite purchase for fans of first person shooter games, and amazing Half-Life 2 might just convert those who aren't. Puzzle gaming fans are not recommended to buy the game just to play Portal unless they intend to play the other components of The Orange Box as well. 

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