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Heading Out To The Highway 17: A New Perspective on Half-Life 2′s Vehicle Sections

With the possible exception of a coordinated black-ops strike team that goes around confiscating the equipment of any publication that carelessly misuses the word 'immersive', there are few things in the world healthier for video game criticism than asking people to re-evaluate games that they once considered immaculate. Not because it's a good idea to instil crippling doubts in people's minds about the things they hold dear – it’s great fun, though, if you know how to target people – but because there's no better way to examine how we could improve. No game was ever surpassed by putting it on a shiny pedestal and gawping slack-jawed at it. Pitch this challenge to a Deus Ex fan and you’ll get a long rant that rattles back and forth between the tranquilizer crossbow, the ridiculousness of Maggie Chow’s sub-plot and the occasional clumsy handling of multiple approach situations (cleaned out Castle Clinton, you say? I didn’t fire a single fucking shot!). Ask me about Doom II and (one day, when I have the time and motivation) I’ll break down, in sweary, bitter prose, how many of the single player maps were gimmicky or poorly directed. Ask somebody who loved Half-Life 2 what their least favourite part was and they’ll probably mumble something about see-saw physics puzzles. Then they’ll pause, hesitate for a second, and say with slightly stronger conviction, “the vehicle sections”. Hmm.

Now then, this is not to say that there aren’t a multitude of good reasons – mostly related to the mechanics – for why Half-Life 2's vehicle sections suck barnacles off a whale's backside. The airboat handles like a shopping trolley on an ice rink the moment you leave the water, the buggy has a turning circle to rival most telecommunications satellites, and despite this, the game delights in making you pull off precise manoeuvres where the punishment for failure is a quick, humiliating death. Stunts are littered here and there – ramps to drive off, barricades to smash through, a Razor Train to play an extremely ill-advised game of chicken with – but between the physics and the controls, chances are that the excitement will be cut short when you clip a tiny piece of geometry and find yourself facing a wall, the wrong way up, in a hailstorm of Combine gunfire. Both sections outstay their welcome, and of course, with the Source engine being what it is, both are regularly punctuated by loading screens that are, even in 2015, astonishingly disruptive. I'm not going to really dismantle any of these arguments, because admittedly they’re all one hundred percent right, but I do think that there are a lot of qualities elsewhere that go mostly unappreciated.

I think part of the problem is that we have a lot of pre-conceived notions about what a ‘vehicle section’ – especially in the context of mid-2000s action games – ought to look like. It's such an archaic term, spat out by the school of design where everything is a discrete 'stage', to be chopped and changed at will. We expect a theme park ride: something that goes very fast, throws a lot of expensive effects in your face, and after a couple of minutes, comes to a screeching halt. It’s supposed to be a distracting novelty; something that turns up when the core gameplay is starting to get stale and leaves when its allotted budget runs out. Within the context of a Half-Life game – one that honestly doesn’t need distractions because the core gameplay is varied enough already – putting in a vehicle section, moreover one that spans an entire chapter, sounds like a waiter going “hey, I can see that you’re enjoying the five-star meal you ordered, but have you considered biting down on this raw onion to break things up?”

Now here’s the thing: Half-Life is a wonderful game through and through – yes, even the Xen bits; I’ll have to write about them one day – but there’s no looking past the fact that it took place almost entirely in the Black Mesa facility. One location. An enormous, varied, impossibly-sprawling location with a rail system to rival Manhattan, true, but at the end of the day it was hardly a world-spanning adventure. Not a problem there, since your two motivations were stopping the alien invasion and getting out of there with all your limbs attached to the rest of you, both of which could be accomplished right then and there, but Half-Life 2 is a completely different kettle of fish. We’re working on a bigger scale here: the Combine have enslaved the entire human race, the planet is being sucked dry, and the level design is far too realistic to have us believe that all the locations in the game are within walking distance of one another. You remember that niggling sense of doubt you had at the back of your head when it turned out that the hellish Eastern European ghost town was just over the hill from the super-secret rebel resistance hideout? Imagine that effect for everything, and grimace. Vehicle sections in Half-Life 2 are a necessity, for the sake of its coherency.

So, their primary mission is to supply scale, and with that in mind a lot more of their characteristics make sense. Long stretches where bugger-all is really happening sound like the worst thing ever in the context of a balls-to-the-wall blitzkrieg of going fast and making things explode, but for a drawn-out trip across a desolate coastline or toxic canal system, they’re just the ticket. Half-Life 2’s vehicle sections were about creating a sense of a larger journey, taking a linear, continuous first-person shooter formula that was suited to skulking around in the depths of a research facility and blowing it up in the only way possible. Episode One got a lot of resounding “meh”s for failing to significantly advance the plot during its brief stay, but I think the problem wasn’t so much about the story – which, let’s be real here, wasn’t exactly a science fiction masterwork to begin with – as it was about the overwhelming feeling that you quite literally, physically, had failed to significantly advance (at least, until the ending sequence). You escape the Citadel by Razor Train at one point, sure, but for all intents and purposes it’s an elevator ride that happens to go sideways; it does little to impress upon you how far you’ve travelled before it stops, tilts over, and dumps you in an underground hellhole.

It's the pacing that saves these bits, I think, but it's also the pacing that alienates people expecting something else. Despite being as linear and scripted as they come, the pacing of Half-Life 2's vehicle sections feels like the directed equivalent of contemporary open-world games along the lines of Far Cry 3. It's the stop-go approach to travel: a treacherous route and a vehicle that manoeuvres like a drunken giraffe, both made tolerable by the fact that you'll probably never go more than a hundred meters without getting out to poke at some roadkill. Shacks, wrecks, warehouses, resistance hideouts; they litter your route, partially for world-building reasons, but mostly as distractions: chances to get out, stretch your legs, find a medkit to patch up your last disastrous run-in, and smack around some headcrabs before they latch onto your face. Both chapters are littered with whole intermissions in this vein, from the canal base to the railway bridge, all carefully placed to ensure that you're never in the driver's seat long enough to get sick of it. Of course, that begs the question “why didn't you make the actual driving mechanics more fun instead of trying to take our minds off them all the time?”, but we’ve already covered that.

More than anything else, Half-Life 2's vehicle sections are... what's the word? Realistic? Believable? No, no, they're too scripted and shallow to earn such titles, and I'd rather dig out my fingernails one by one than throw those words around without a damn good reason. Nevertheless, I think it's safe to say that they're grounded. They're not fanciful rollercoasters that you carelessly blast through, discarding your means of transport when you irresponsibly trash it; they're harrowing journeys, laced with roadblocks to contend with more than inexplicably placed sweet ramps. Half-Life has always resisted the urge to turn its spectacles into Hollywood pastiches, favouring set-pieces that match its tone rather than just going for the flashiest solutions, and once again, the vehicle sections bow to this philosophy. If this was, say, Call of Duty – not to pick on such a worn-out undeserving punching bag, but you know how it is – Corporal G. Freeman would've ramped off the top of that hydroelectric dam at the end of Water Hazard in a ball of flames as the helicopter gunship peppered his ailing airboat with minigun fire, and there's no denying that would have been a great deal more exciting than what actually happens. But would it have been more believable than taking down the gunship, flushing out the nearby outpost and manually cranking the floodgates open? Of course not. Half-Life is brilliant because the highs are bookended by the lows. It's the downtime that makes Half-Life 2's vehicle sections compelling: crashing through a plate-glass window only to have to awkwardly flip yourself upright again, clearing the way ahead on foot, forgetting where you parked, getting caught up in roadblocks and stopping to loot a cluster of rickety fishing huts.

It's this kind of grounded experience that encourages one of the most fascinating aspects of Half-Life 2's vehicle sections: mutual dependence. The game doesn't force you into the driver's seat and lock you in there until events demand that you leave; you can climb out any time and wander as far as the terrain will allow you. You don't, because you need that transport, and when the route ahead is obstructed, it needs you. You develop an attachment to your vehicle, not because the game is the kind of railroading wank that handcuffs you to it until it has fulfilled its purpose, but because – as Alyx rightfully says at one point – you simply wouldn't stand a chance without it. Even the original Half-Life did this kind of relationship, albeit in a more limited fashion, with On A Rail. Go on. Tell me that at the end of Highway 17 you weren't even a little bit upset to leave behind the buggy that had seen you through all that adversity. The buggy that you clumsily leapt over a low-flying gunship in; the buggy you accidentally parked too close to a cliff and nearly sent careening into the icy water; the buggy that that was utterly useless, and at the same time, utterly invaluable.