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I still have never completed Half-Life. I must have played through the opening levels multiple times, enjoying the scene setting and the initial escape from the headcrabs. The game is still quite spooky and panic-inducing at times, with mild jump scares and swarms of enemies appearing; the library in Halo is an obvious comparison, but Half-Life’s setting is much more varied and less monotonous than that.

I play the game quite cautiously, conserving ammunition as much as possible but shooting at the enemies from a distance. There are quite a lot of health recharge stations around (as far as I’ve got, at least), and I’m making maximum use of quick save functionality to keep my health high as I work through the levels. I get the feeling that this isn’t the way I’m supposed to play it, and maybe once I’ve completed it once I might be a little more gung-ho and run through the levels, much as I do nowadays with the first three Halo games.

For now, though, I’m enjoying it. I’ve reached the part where the soldiers first appear (in the chapter “We’ve got Hostiles”), and the scientists are overjoyed to be saved … until they aren’t. I’ve made my way up the lift and outside, only to run back into the vents as a helicopter started to attack me. They’re now using laser trip wires to set off sentry guns; I get the feeling they’re not interested in a chat over coffee.

I maintain that this is the best game of all time.

Having passed Bloodlust, I moved onto the next few levels: Middle Ground, Head Hunter, and Unlikely Allies. Having introduced all the mechanics by this point, the game starts to be clever with its objectives. Middle Ground is a level based around the Armageddon spell – being the first to claim it, and building up an army quickly to do so. Head Hunter is a much more varied level, with one tribe (the reds) being overly powerful and looking to obtain Armageddon before others are ready, and this means there is a key objective of getting the shaman up to the stone head before the prayers are completed. Unlikely Allies sees you having to protect the yellows – who are seemingly a lot less capable than in other levels – from red attacks, all while suffering from limited building space.

Middle Ground is probably one of the easier levels, since it’s possible to prevent others from attacking you while also protecting the centre stone head. It’s a symmetric level, and it’s advantageous to encourage the three other tribes to attack each other as a preference. I was able to build a balloon army to carry out skirmishes on the reds and greens, again laying swamps where I knew the red shaman would try to go after being reincarnated. After enough attacks on the other armies (with earthquakes doing a decent amount of damage, I called the Armageddon and won the level.

Unlikely Allies was tricky to start with – it takes a while to build huts and a balloon to transport the shaman, and the first attack on the yellow base was soon after starting. I concentrated on building mana for swamp spells, which I cast on the ramp up to the yellow base, and this alone meant that the red shaman died several times, helping me to grow faster. I used land bridge to block off access to my settlement from the red village (by casting it between two hills), then expanded sideways and installed fire warriors in watch towers along the coasts and on top of the ridge. I then took the fight to the red village, with fire storms and earthquakes destroying the firetraining huts and fire warriors quickly. I was half expecting a plot twist where the yellows suddenly turned on me, but that didn’t happen.

The hardest level was Head Hunter, where my village was in the centre of the other three tribes, and there was an urgency to stop the reds from gaining the Armageddon spell. The greens kept sending boats from the South, so I built a wall of watchtowers manned by fire warriors, and set up a campfire with many warriors and preachers circling. This didn’t help protect from the yellows, who kept landing on the West side, so I again set up defences there. In order to buy myself time to do this, I sent my shaman to hypnotise the red army who was in the way of the stone head, and I cast multiple swamps around the base. It turned into a bit of a war of attrition, renewing swamps and building up my village over and over again. In the end I set up multiple fire warriors in balloons overseeing the stone head, then went off to examine and decimate the yellow and green armies to stop them attacking me. It took four hours in total, reducing the sizes of other armies before I obtained and cast Armageddon myself.

I’ve now completed the four levels at the divergent point on the plan, so next I have the last two levels I can try in any order.