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Valve Software is known for its quality games and long delays, although the former can certainly be said to outweigh the latter in the final tally. The Orange Box collects some of their best work yet, including full versions of Half-Life 2, Half-Life 2: Episode 1, Half-Life 2: Episode 2, Portal, and Team Fortress 2. Even if you’ve already experienced Gordon Freeman’s adventures on Combine-dominated Earth, The Orange Box brings enough to the table to satisfy just about any gamer.

Gordon? Gordon Freeman?

Half-Life 2 and Half-Life 2: Episode 1 are the only retreads in the Box. For console gamers who have never played Half-Life 2, this alone makes the game a must-buy. Half-Life 2 follows the adventures of silent theoretical physicist turned freedom fighter Gordon Freeman, who single-handedly inspires the human race to revolt against alien overlords known as the Combine. A long and twisting narrative sees Gordon navigating the streets of City 17, buzzing along the countryside’s canals on a fanboat, rumbling along crumbling freeways in a dune buggy, bisecting headcrab zombies with giant saw blades, battling giant alien walkers, and generally fighting for his life in innumerable unlikely situations.

While the FPS genre has evolved much in the three years since Half-Life 2’s release, Gordon can still swing a crowbar and sling a gravity gun with the best of them. The console version of the game is extremely close to the PC edition, although some control concessions are made in certain areas. The fanboat’s gun auto-targets now, for instance, and the lighting is much brighter to allow you to see enemies sooner due to the slower aiming speed of an analog stick as compared to a mouse. There is an option to change the display to “PC Monitor,” which restores the darker, richer tones of the PC version, but it can be more difficult to play.

Episode 1 continues the story, beginning a three-part arc of episodic content that starts out very strong and left PC gamers on the edge of a cliffhanger for a year. Valve’s lighting and physics work improves noticeably between the original game and Episode 1. Indeed, one of the coolest elements of The Orange Box is watching the Source engine evolve from game to game.

The Orange Box (finally) delivers Episode 2, picking up where Episode 1 left off. Despite a slow start in which Gordon starts out weaponless (again), slogging through constricted antlion caves, most of Episode 2 takes place in large, open outdoor environments, addressing the criticism that too much of Half-Life 2 confines you to corridor shooting. Tremendous setpiece moments and new uses of the physics engine for puzzle-solving makes the game feel fresh, despite being the third part of an ongoing plotline.

About damn time

Team Fortress 2 has been in the works for nearly a full decade. After constant delays and several complete overhauls, it finally makes its debut in The Orange Box. It was worth the wait. The years of fine-tuning have produced what could be the most well-balanced online multiplayer game since chess.

As in the original Team Fortress and Team Fortress Classic, you choose a class to play as and attempt to take and hold flags or territory from your opponents. Team Fortress 2 takes this concept and streamlines the gameplay to an extreme degree. Grenades have been eliminated entirely, with various explosive devices being integrated into specific classes instead. The visual look of the game is unique and illustrative, foregoing realism for a stylized appearance that makes the game stand out both in comparison to its competitors and its companions in The Orange Box.

Just about any player will find a class to suit them. The Heavy Weapons Guy can deal and take damage like crazy for the folks who like to blow stuff up. The Spy infiltrates the enemy team and uses invisibility to go for stealth kills. Engineers build machinery to assist the team. Scouts use speed and double-jumping to harass the enemy and steal flags with ease. The variety is astounding, and the balance is such that there is no “best class.” Every character in the game has advantages and weaknesses that makes him both fun to play and hard to master.

The cake is a lie

Finally there is Portal, an odd little game that nobody really paid a whole lot of attention to in light of the Half-Life episodes and the long-awaited Team Fortress 2. But once you fire up Portal, you’ll be hard-pressed to put it down again. Portal documents your adventures as an android in the Aperture Science testing chambers, using a gun that can create extra-spatial portals to navigate fiendishly complex puzzle rooms.

It sounds simple, and in concept, it is. But you can do so much with the portals using the physics and construction of the game’s levels that there’s almost an endless number of ways to play around with your reality-bending toy. When the story is done, you can go back and try advanced versions of six of the game’s levels, and only the absolute best of the best players will succeed at scoring gold medals on them.

Through it all, you’re helped and harassed by GLaDOS, an insane AI who manages to deliver some of the most wickedly hilarious dark humor ever seen in a videogame. The writing in Portal is often legitimately brilliant, and the ending sequence and credits must be seen to be believed. This won’t take long, as the game can be completed in about three hours, but the length feels just about right. The advanced stages add enough playtime to make Portal the shining gem of The Orange Box.

The Million Box

It’s hard to think of a game on the shelves that provides more bang for the buck than The Orange Box. For $60, you get one of the best games ever made along with its episodic sequels, a top-tier multiplayer game, and a brilliant little puzzler with some of the best writing in the medium. There’s really no reason not to own it.

Review by: Matt Keil
Video Produced by: Matt Keil