Alyx was an extremely likeable character even in HL2, and in this episode she’s no different; in fact they’ve injected her with a better sense of humor (the Zombine joke cracked me up). On the flip side, there’s not much of Dog as some of us would have hoped, but he constantly makes an appearance from time to time.
Gameplay hasn’t changed much since HL2 (why fix something that isn’t broken right?). All we get this time round are more physic based puzzles (especially in the first level where you’re only wielding the Gravity Gun) and a new enemy called the Zombine (a combine zombie – Alyx).
Visually, the game does no wrong, courtesy of the Source engine and as a bonus; Valve has also included the much-hyped HDR effect in it. It never ceases to amaze me how good this game looks even though it has pretty modest system requirements.
In conclusion, Episode 1 doesn’t pack a lot of new content, and is pretty short, but it’s polished and thoroughly entertaining and off course, if you loved HL2, you’ll lap up everything this game has to throw at you.
Minimum System Requirements:
- 2.4 GHz Processor
- 256MB RAM
- DirectX 7 level graphics card
- Windows 2000/XP/ME/98
nice review Avi 
