Melees are hand to hand.
The ep2 ending is one of my favorite boss battles in years. But it is a nightmare until you realize you can just run down the hunters, then it becomes relatively easy.
I deserve an achievement for winning the final battle without running over any hunters, then.
It helps, but they’re also stupendously weak to things fired at them from the gravity gun. Two logs seemed to do as much damage as two rockets.
I’m in the group that thinks the ending was too hard. All of a sudden you are using a car to kill hunters and using the new sticky bomb on striders. It’s a lot of new stuff thrown at you at once, as opposed to the normal method of having things introduced and building up to a big fight that uses those skills. To me it felt like a fight completely out of the context of the rest of the episode, where you never face that many enemies at one time.
Two things bothered me about the fight that are unrelated to it’s actual difficulty.
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So, it’s really key that the striders don’t get too close to that rocket. Yet, for some reason Alyx spends the fight being a mechanic and getting the helicopter ready to go rather than helping. Maybe it was time someone other than Eli took over as leader of the resistance anyway.
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Where was Dog? They establish his ability to take out a strider one on one, but when the crap is hitting the fan and dozens are attacking he’s nowhere to be seen. Another wise use of resources.
When I gravity gun a log into a hunter, and then finish it off with a crowbar, doesn’t that count? If you must be pedantic about how the AI fought, how about, “the big swirling close-quarters battle was a blast?”
Did you get an achievement for saving all the buildings too? I know I did and I pretty much had to kill most of the hunters in certain situations, otherwise they would just blow up the sticky bomb as I was shooting it at the strider.
And of course after they shoot the sticky bomb it becomes useless, argh!!! The hardest point for me was that while you may fight each strider in the order that it spawns, it’s actually not the optimal order if you want to save all the buildings, so sometimes I had to ignore older striders for the newest ones.
Not only are you pedantic, Mog, you’re wrong. “Melee” as a term for any confused battle is a perfectly acceptable use.
ObHalfLifecomment: Didn’t care for the final battle either. In fact, I was pretty put out with Episode 2 long before that point.
-TomI’m apparently one of the few who really loved the final fight. It’s tough, but I felt comfortable with it, even when I had to fight with the vehicle physics to get to a strider group. Valve has never created a stronger final battle.
Episode 2 really was a great time, but man, those characters are starting to become a real drag. Mawkish and doe-eyed, I cringed every time Eli or Alyx (hip spelling, Valve!) had something to say that didn’t involve the G-man. I understand why they love Gordon, but it’s awkward that Valve is trying to create the sensation that they love me. What did I do to deserve their affection?
“Melee” has been appropriated to mean a close quarter/hand to hand type of attack opposed to a ranged attack in RPGs/Computer games for years now, so in that usage Mog’s statement isn’t “wrong.” Neither was the intended usage.
I spent a long time on the final fight till I figured that out. Then I stock piled bombs, let the soliders take care of the hunters and I took care of the striders. It was easy then.
Mog’s statement is both wrong – and even “wrong” – in that he was trying to correct someone who used the word correctly. That’s the problem with being a pedant: it doesn’t work if you don’t know what the word means.
Plus, it derails a perfectly good thread where we should be arguing about the ending of Episode 2.
-TomIt was tough, but my final plan was this:
When the level starts, run up and take care of the first few easy striders. When the big intermission happens, go ahead and run back to the base, and start pulling and dropping the sticky bombs so that you have ten or so lying around.
Then, when the striders start swarming, jump back in the car and start smooshing hunters at the far part. When you’ve taken out most of them, head back to the base and wait for the striders.
The last trick is to try and put the sticky bombs on the front “face” of the striders, that way there’s a good chance that the AI troops will set it off for you before you have to switch to pistol.
H.
Just to sum up some of the better alternative ways to kill hunters:
-The AR2’s secondary fire is one hit.
-Grenades and rockets are fairly effective, two hits.
-Logs take only two solid hits.
-The hunters’ flechette explosions kill them in one hit. It’s not too difficult to time a log to hit them as the darts explode; the audio cue is useful.
I agree with Chuck, the final battle in ep2 is my favorite action sequence in any game that I can recall. I thoroughly enjoyed it even the second time through.
I didn’t want to wait till the striders made it back to the base, especially with 3 or 4 striders coming in for the final crunch.
Pretty much the main efficient way of destroying the hunters is to run over them with your car. Head out to the closest strider with one of those explosive bombs held at the back of your car. Run over the hunters accompanying said striders. Jump out, use the gravity gun to pin the bomb on the strider, then shoot away.
Rinse, repeat.
Same here. I sniped a number of hunters with my crossbow, too.
I loved the ending of episode 2. It’s probably the best fight in the series so far. It did a great job of bringing together the various skills you’ve learned over the three half-life 2 games (the car, the gravity gun, shooting), it was completely frantic, and it had an epic feel. The sound of an exploding Strider felt like cashing a paycheck. The hush that fell over the area after the battle was over was a quiet exclamation point.
This battle in some ways showed me what’s possible with the engine when you aren’t creeping around in mineshafts and ventilation ducks.
The only thing I didn’t like was the “Save All Buildings” achievement, which you can safely ignore (and I did). Honestly, the exploding buildings added to the atmosphere. I wouldn’t want to take away those splinters of wood. They made me feel like things were a matter of survival.
I’m with Fuzzy. The ending to Ep2 rocked, very different mechanics from most FPS games. I loved the idea of using the car to carry the sticky boms. I tried adding to the idea by placing a bunch of explosive canisters in the passenger seat but alas they slid off to easily.
What I didn’t like about Ep2 was the begining part where you’re walking over bugs inside of someone’s small intestines.
I was pretty frustrated at the ending when I played through it, but in retrospect it was a pretty good ending. I generally just don’t like being in a time crunch like that though. If there was any flaw in the ending it was not making it more clear that the hunters were weak against physical damage. Someone mentioned that a couple of rebels you pass on the way out mention something about killing hunters with physical damage, but I either missed it or it didn’t register to me.
Overall I liked Ep 2, but I was disappointed that it felt like 3/4 of the game was fighting antlions and zombies instead of the Combine. The Combine soldiers are just so much more interesting and fun to fight.
Loved the final battle, after feeling pretty meh with the rest of the game. I also didn’t know you could run over the hunters but I still managed the fight without too much trouble. The ammo in the various buildings continuously respawns, it seems, so it was just a matter of falling back for resupply often enough.
I also liked the ending after that point too, because you’re just waiting for the other shoe to drop. As soon as Eli mentioned the G-man earlier on I was thinking “whups, he’s toast.”
As an aside, I know Gordon being mute is supposed to help you identify with him, but when these relatively active and interesting NPCs are interacting with him extensively without him interacting back it starts to damage my suspension of disbelief. I think it would have been better if it was implied that Gordon does occasionally talk, but his lines are simply left to the imagination of the player. Instead we get lines like “You don’t talk much, huh?” which just makes me roll my eyes.