I had no idea that the car would kill the hunters. This also explains the presence of those logs strewn all around :P
I have to agree with the idea that it felt like they were throwing a whole new game at you in the last 30 minutes.
I really liked the strider fight - and normally I hate boss fights. Part of what made it work for me is that it’s a lot more freeform than your average “oooh, memorize the boss’s patterns, then hit his weak spot!” fight. You have a lot of tactics you can use on the hunters (run them over, grav-gun them with debris, rocket them to death, etc.); and you can tackle the striders in whatever order you like once they show up (though the ones closest to the base usually take priority, obviously). EDIT: in short, I liked it precisely because it was giving you something you’ve never done before. By comparison, Ep. 1’s finale was a far more conventional - and boring - boss fight.
The tactic I found most effective: load a sticky bomb into the car; zoom at top speed into the hunters, possibly shouting “YEEHA!” or humming the Dukes of Hazzard theme song or adding some narration (“Looks like the Duke boys are in a bit of a pickle…”); once the hunters are down, hop out of the car and grav-gun the sticky bomb onto the strider; switch to the pistol and detonate said bomb with a choice Arnie quote (“Hasta la vista, baby!”); head for the nearest bomb depot and repeat as necessary.
Overall, I found the ending setpiece a little frustrating, and so contrived even in a series where contrived setups are the norm, that it passed the line from expected, to goofy, to irritating, back to goofy. It would have been much more entertaining if the car didn’t handle so poorly.
It was, however, much better than bouncing on a trampoline and shooting a floating space baby in the brain, so it definitely has that going for it.
I can’t imagine anyone else finding any other tactics effective at all.
It blows my mind that some of you wouldn’t have thought to use the car to run down the Hunters. Not only is it the most effective way to kill them (except when they start dodging it), its the most fun!
So yeah, you could put me down for enjoying the final fight a lot. Sure I died a lot, and sure it was probably a bit frustrating, but I loved the sheer scale of it. I loved the siren going off everytime a strider got to close and I loved gunning it around the hills looking for hunters and striders. I have one particularly cool memory of driving up to one house just as a strider blew it apart and the lumber went flying everywhere, that was awesome.
PS. Also, could we talk about the last, last level with one of the most intense final scenes ever? Shit… Eli gets murdered with his daughter screaming right in front of him and with you helpless to stop any of it. Hardcore.
I thought the last fight was great for simply giving me a large area to drive around and choose which stuff to fight when. I didn’t find it espcially hard either.
You guys do know that the supply posts usually spawn more health, ammo and energy packs? If you’re getting hurt just jump in the car and retreat for more health/ammo/shields.
I’d say Dog saving us from certain doom at only certain times and not others has officially worn out its welcome. It didn’t quite ruin anything here, but it if they try it any more in Episode 3, I’ll be pretty sad.
Well my main problem with the car was having to remap controls every time I got in and out of the car.
Beyond that I kept getting the car stuck on things that I couldn’t get off.
Why did you remap the controls?
Because for some reason Valve only allows one set of keys for each mapping.
My usual fps setup is to have fowards and backwards be my right and middle mouse buttons. I have to switch them to w and s in order to drive the car. I don’t mind it once or twice a level but remapping controls 20+ times got on my nerves. Plus it would break my concentration which sucked when they started flooding in.
I’ll add my vote in for loving the end battle, but I actually heard about using the car before I got there, so that made it pretty easy. I think they kinda of suggest the car at one point, but if I didn’t already know to use it, I probably wouldn’t have.
And while I didn’t die once, the striders got 2 or 3 of my buildings…which is so worth it. To see them hunker down, aim their gun and make that other worldly screeching sound almost made me want to let them blow up everything. :)
The last battle was OK. I can’t figure out why I’m not more excited about it. It was pretty frantically paced, had some nice tension to it, some spectactular visuals when buildings went down… but for some reason I just didn’t love it.
I guess it’s because:
a) I don’t like the strider killing bombs. Maybe if they’d been established earlier.
b) I don’t like how all of a sudden Hunters are chumps. We were taught that hunters are THE BADASS ENEMY. I remember the first time two hunters attacked me (I think it was in the ambush inside that house. Yeah, that one!) it was a really frantic, panic inducing moment. But hey now I just have to bump into them with the car (you don’t need much velocity) and they just go down.
c) The vehicle controls in HL2 are pretty shitty.
d) I’d like to have seen Dog take down some Striders. As people pointed out, his absence was kind of jarring. Just throw a few set pieces in, where a Strider gets taken out by Dog in the background…
I thought it was going to be corny, but the voice acting absolutely sold it. The fadeout to credits was shockingly good.
Indeed and I will miss Robert Guillaume very much if it really is the end of Eli. :/
I also just thought of something. Given the photos of what can happen to a car when it hits a deer I’m going to have to call bullshit on running down about 20 hunters with that jalopy.
:P
No, actually, that was very logical. All those mangled-up cars you see who’ve smacked into deer at speed? Notice how all the hoods are crumpled up. That’s the common element. The hood.
The Episode2mobile had no hood, and thus was impervious to impacts.
Yeah, that car was totally not realistic. The thing had a turbo button but for the life of me I couldn’t find the turbo on the car. Also, turbos don’t give you a sudden burst of speed. It acted like a shot of nitrous or something.
Then I realized I was playing Half-Life and not rFactor and promptly shut myself up.
Actually, that may be a false deduction before. It occurred to me how that Vortigaunt sidekick you bughunted with was invulnerable, and presumably the other ones are too. You don’t actually see how they fix up your car while you’re busy crawling to the Combine’s only powerful machinegun emplacement–I think it’s probable that they actually painted the car over with a thin layer of, er, vortessence. You know, like KITT’s paintjob!
I found the ending pretty much impossible until I checked a spoiler and found out that you need to kill them with the car. They really need to give you some sort of hint about that. It’s not at all intuitive that the piece of crap car you’re driving around that looks like it’s falling apart poses any threat at all to the hunters. I would have expected if anything that driving into the hunters would destroy the car, not them.