Half-Life: Blue Shift: An Adequate Expansion Pack

[SPOILERS BELOW]

Half-Life is one of those series that seems almost untouchable, with high praise for both the original, it's sequel and the sequel's sequels. As a sidenote, it must be said that the whole episodes thing threw me off when I first heard about them. Stupid younger me thought that the episodes for HL2 was just HL2 divided into two halves for some reason.

Anyway, needless deviation aside, despite the high praise those games received, there doesn't seem to be as much love for Half-Life's expansions, Blue Shift and Opposing Force. Well...actually, it's more, "lots of love for Opposing Force, and little left for poor old Blue Shift". However, after beating Blue Shift, I can see why people aren't as enthralled with it as everything else HL-related. 

After all, Blue Shift is considered the black sheep of the Half-Life games and largely for good reason. Most of the expansion isn't anything ground-breaking, at least in terms of it's mechanics. In terms of the story, however, it's somewhat interesting watching Black Mesa collapse into anarchy from another perspective. For in Blue Shift, you aren't Gordon Freeman, you are Barney Calhoun! A guard working at Black Mesa, coming into work on the day where everything goes wrong. That's a bit of bad luck, that. But no matter! You are equipped with...the exact same arsenal of weaponry you had in Half-Life. I mean, that's fine. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. But Blue Shift retreads over the same ground that Half-Life had already well-worn with it's 'Game Of The Year boots', and adds very little extra. In addition, because much of the gameplay is ripped from it's predecessor, it doesn't feel like you're playing as Calhoun; it still feels like you're playing as Freeman.

Now, on to what makes Blue Shift not so great. First of all, most of the bad stuff is in the second half, which makes the second half kinda rubbish. The first half, while your typical Half-Life affair, is still fun with some neat level design. But much of the second half consists of either guiding Dr. Rosenberg, a man who says he can teleport us out of this nightmare using science, through halls and stairways. Because if there's one thing Half-Life needed, it was more escort sections with it's bumbling AI, that likes to get stuck on nothing and be babysat constantly. Not to mention that by the end of the game, the action and excitement has almost completely fizzled out with you pressing buttons, and being locked in a room, waiting for Rosenberg to say his piece. I mean, I'm all for world-building and story-telling, but the game doesn't do itself any favours by ending unexcitingly, which doesn't help things at all. You see a few set-pieces (most notably, Gordon being dragged along by two soldiers in the infamously cartoonish "What body?" cutscene), Dr. Rosenberg says "Oh thank god, we escaped!" and then you fade to black, and the game ends. Now, knowing Half-Life, I was expecting a bait-and-switch where the game suddenly ends on a cliff-hanger, but the ending was surprisingly...conclusive instead, in a way that's both satisfying (because the game ends in a way that resolves the story effectively) and disappointing (due to it's abruptness).

Not to mention that the game's sudden ending is compounded by having the game take four hours to beat. But I'm actually quite thankful for that. It makes for a short-but-sweet experience, even though it's an experience I've had several times before. So, even though Blue Shift doesn't have a lot of meat on the bone, it's still decent for what it's worth. Although, it says a lot about this expansion when a fan-made mod like Half-Life: Echoes, They Hunger and many, many others have much more content, actually expand mechanically and narratively on what made Half-Life so great in the first place, and are far and away more worthy of your time than this.