As a piece of design, this gives the player practical information, disorients and intimidates, and also acts as a narrative beat for the soldiers' identity. When you're 'deafened' by an explosion, the audio becomes a radio whine that parallels and loops back into the Combine's soundscape. Half-Life 2 uses music to establish mood, but the flood of Combine communication is a more subtle technique - flipping the player into the 'hunted' mindset, aurally discomforting and emphasising that in City 17, Freeman is the outsider. One of Half-Life 2's staple enemies, the Combine soldiers are always accompanied by the sounds of their communications - they definitely seem to be speaking English, but you'd be hard-pressed to ever identify more than a word or two over the abrupt, whining rasps that texture it. Take as an example one sound effect, the Combine's voice-distorted chatter. id Software can make a gun go boom as well as anyone, but Valve give that squeeze of the trigger more context and impact than anyone. The difference between Half-Life 2 and other linear shooters is how much effort has been put into its environments and pacing, how it peaks and troughs, and how much incidental stuff there is to find. Let's not pick on Doom 3 too much, because it's fine for what it is, but this call-and-response design can be the bane of a linear game if it becomes too predictable or repetitive, the player gets bored. When you see rockets, you know you're going to fight a helicopter. When you see the trigger for a trap in Ravenholm, you know a zombie will soon appear near it. When you enter a Doom 3 room and hit a button, monsters will pour out of the walls. Half-Life 2's immediate competition was Doom 3, a comparison that's worth bearing in mind, because they're both linear corridor shooters designed to give the player a directed experience. The keenly-felt absence of Half-Life 3 helps with this impression, but Half-Life 2 feels like a game on a tightrope - not stuck in the middle, exactly, so much as a pioneer of the modern first-person shooter that still contains much of the 'old' first-person shooter. The game is shorn of context, too, and compared with successors that stripped its bones of ideas and sometimes improved on them. Physics, story, environmental design - Gravity Gun, City 17, Ravenholm. The 'classic' moniker almost instantly embalms them, gradually fossilising to a few forever-parroted talking points while the living entity is obscured. Half-Life 2 has met the fate of all exceptional games.
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