If you’re one of the over twenty-two million daily users of Steam, the digital video game storefront created by Valve Corporation that’s taken the world by storm since September of 2003, then chances are you have played at least one of the many titles that they have developed throughout the years.
And even if you have played only one of their many blockbuster releases, chances are again that at some point maybe you’ve thought to yourself something along the lines of: “This game is great, but what is the *best* game Valve has ever released?”
Well folks, today I’m going to answer that question for you using statistical data from metacritic.com, critic and user reviews, and more. So let’s just jump right in and get straight into the list!
#10: Counter-Strike: Source (PC/Mac/Linux)
Counter-Strike: Source Beta Pre Release E3 2004 Announcement Gameplay Trailer
In one round, you play as a Terrorist trying to plant a bomb in a dusty village square while your fellow extremists fight off the enemy team before they can stop you. In the next round, you play as a Counter-Terrorist trying to escort a group of hostages to freedom while their captors riddle the mundane office walls with bullet holes in an attempt to gun you down.
Counter-Strike: Source is a direct remake of the previous and first title in the franchise, Counter-Strike, using the newly debuting ‘Source’ engine, which itself was an upgrade of the original ‘GoldSrc’ engine.
The franchise is known for its unique gameplay elements in the FPS genre, such as how firing your weapon continuously both dramatically reduces your speed and causes severe weapon recoil, and players remaining permanently dead for the remainder of the round’s length after being killed, along with many more features that help the franchise’s focus on tactical skill-based teamwork distinguish itself from other First Person Shooters.
In being remade on the new Source engine, Counter-Strike: Source greatly succeeds the original with changes such as an upgraded physics engine that allows ambient objects in the environment to be interactable, gameplay changes to combat and improved AI, and upgraded graphical visuals that heavily improved the map environments, the character models, and even additional little details such as more realistic water effects in puddles around the maps.
All of these details and more served to make Counter-Strike: Source a majorly successful release back in 2004, and with the game currently sitting at Overwhelmingly Positive on Steam with over 106,00 user reviews, it’s more than deserving of the #10 spot on this list.
“Counter-Strike: Source blends Counter-Strike's award-winning teamplay action with the advanced technology of Source™ technology.” - CS:S Steam Page
#9: Left 4 Dead (PC/Mac/Xbox 360)
Left 4 Dead Full Trailer HD
Two weeks after the start of the “Green Flu” epidemic in the ruins of Pennsylvania, four survivors who are immune to the deadly virus, named Bill, Zoey, Francis, and Louis, must fight to survive against the overwhelming horde of infected undead. Some of the infected are beginning to mutate into newer deadlier forms, a distressing realization that only serves to further escalate the unstoppable threat that seeks to add these four unlikely allies to their ever-growing ranks…
2008’s Left 4 Dead brings the many distinct charms Valve is known for to life in a twisted, undead fashion. The gameplay focuses on you playing with three other players or three AIs if you’re the only one left uninfected, to survive against an endless horde of zombies in numerous ‘movie’-like campaigns that all have their own charming aesthetics and unique layouts.
To keep every game feeling fresh, Valve added a dynamic artificial intelligence “Director” that determines which enemies to spawn when and what items to spawn where depending on how the players are doing, giving every different run through a campaign its own unique experience.
Along with the masterfully constructed gameplay, one of the best parts of the game is the brilliantly written personalities of the four survivors who each will win you over in minutes. With the gameplay and setting combined, this game will truly make you feel like you’re the one scrounging for desperate survival in a zombie apocalypse.
"Zombies have appeared in video games in many forms, but nobody ever nailed the full-on zombie apocalypse until Valve's Left 4 Dead.” is what the 200th issue of Game Informer Magazine had to say about Left 4 Dead when they ranked it #82 in the top 200 games of all time. The incredibly designed gameplay of L4D persists even today, fifteen years later, as many games released after it that follow a similar ‘four-player survival’ style have been unofficially dubbed ‘Left 4 Dead-likes’ by some, which goes to show that this game has more than earned its place in the gaming history books.
If you haven’t played Left 4 Dead, I highly recommend you give it a chance, as I’m sure you’ll be quickly infected by its charms as well. But if you aren’t convinced yet, then maybe the next game on our list will serve as an alternative…
Once called "quite possibly the perfect co-op shooter." by IGN in 2008, Left 4 Dead leaves a legacy as one of the greatest multiplayer games of all time.
#8: Left 4 Dead 2 (PC/Mac/Xbox 360)
Left 4 Dead 2 Intro
The infection returns stronger than ever in Valve’s hit 2009 sequel Left 4 Dead 2, where this time around we join four new immune survivors of the virus outbreak, Ellis, Coach, Rochelle, and Nick. Instead of the impeccably dreary setting of Pennsylvania, our new survivors have to escape from sweltering Savannah, Georgia, and make their way down to New Orleans, rumored to be the last standing city in America. But their journey won’t be any easier than that of the previous survivors, as with this new game, so too are there new variants of the Special Infected out there with the sole, unified goal of bringing down our new makeshift team of survivors…!
While the core gameplay in L4D2 remains the same as the previous title, many new changes brought with this sequel only help to expand the already vast experience. All the weapon types from the previous title return, but now with the new addition of a wide range of melee weapons, a new throwable ‘Boomer Bile’ weapon to go with the Pipe-Bombs and Molotovs, a pack of chest paddles to shockingly revive your dead friends on the spot, and even new firearms like Magnum pistols and Grenade Launchers!
But the undead have new tricks as well, with the Charger, Spitter, and Jockey joining the horde, both sides of this infection have been strengthened up from the first game, which only serves to add to the intense, action-packed survival gameplay core of Left 4 Dead that fans fell in love with a year prior.
But if you’re still more of a fan of the original survivors and their campaigns then don’t worry, because even with all these new additions, the old survivors that audiences grew to love from L4D1 also return along with all their old campaigns as well. But just like with the new survivors, the original campaigns also have access to the new selection of weapons and the new zombies to face off against, giving the classic campaigns new twists which only make them all the more fun.
With over 570,000 user reviews, Left 4 Dead 2 sits at Overwhelmingly Positive on Steam as well just as the previous two titles on this list. So it’s a no-brainer why even fourteen years later the game still regularly sees over thirty-five thousand daily players, myself occasionally still being one of them.
If you have a few friends that you ever want to go zombie slaying with, I can’t recommend enough that you fork over the $9.99 price of admission for this undead action masterpiece! Trust me, you’ll more than get your money’s worth.
One year later, Left 4 Dead was ‘Back 4 More’ in 2009, with pre-order sales being 4 times larger than the first game’s and the sequel being voted that year’s Best Xbox 360 game.
#7: Dota 2 (PC/Mac/Linux)
Dota 2 Gamescom Trailer
You have to keep calm and be ready to make split-second decisions as you charge the enemy base with your team. Your character gets slowed as you unwittingly step into a nest of cobwebs woven by the giant enemy spider, Broodmother, who uses a horde of her own young to try and devour you before your teammate Juggernaut leaps forward to cut down the spider with a rapid series of sword slashes! But in this chaos, he doesn’t have time to react to the two-headed dragon Jakiro soaring overhead, using one head to freeze him in place before the other roasts him with flames.
The enemy Drow Ranger sees you and slows you with a volley of frost arrows, and when all hope seems lost, your teammate playing the massive rock golem named Tiny emerges from the forest to cause an avalanche that stuns the enemy players, while your Zeus charges forth and calls down a bolt of lightning to slay both enemy players at once! Victory may seem secure now, but as nerve-racking and sweat-inducing as all that action was, that was just one small battle of many, and you still have to destroy the enemy base…!
Dota 2 is a highly intense, Five-on-Five PVP multiplayer online battle arena (or MOBA) game, where you and four others on your team select from a pool of 124 unique heroes to go up against five foes in a deadly game of tactical balance and action-packed combat that requires quick thinking and a level head. You start the game at level one and have to grow stronger throughout the match by slaying the enemy players and the army of weak foot soldiers both teams have at their disposal called Creeps, to collect XP that increases the power of your skills and Gold used to purchase items that increase your stats.
Any given match can last from thirty minutes to over an hour, as both teams struggle in a thrilling back-and-forth game of strength and cunning, trying to out-muscle the other team, with the end goal ultimately being to destroy the many defensive towers along the three main ‘lanes’ of combat so you can smash your way through the enemy base and destroy their ‘Ancient’, the main target of the entire match, to secure your team’s victory.
Though all of this can likely sound a bit ‘too intense’ for a new player, the game comes built-in with various tutorials to show you how everything works mechanically, and on top of that every character comes with a Hero Guide written by the Dota 2 community, so if you find a character or two that you like but you think they might be real tough to figure out, you can hop into a few practice games to fully iron out every detail before jumping online to put your skills to the test against hundreds of thousands of other players.
Speaking from personal experience, I’m far from the best Dota 2 player. But now and then I still get that urge to belt out a few matches to scratch that MOBA itch. And if reading this also gave you that same feeling, then there’s nothing stopping you from going out to give Dota 2 a try yourself today. Because in case you didn’t know, the game’s free to play! So really, what excuse do you have not to try it out knowing that?
With a daily average of over 440,000 players and the yearly Esports tournament known as ‘The International’ having a crowdfunded prize pool of $40 million US in 2021, Valve’s Source 2 Engine sequel to Defense of the Ancients continues to carry the torch in the MOBA genre.
#6: Portal (PC/Mac/Linux/PS3/Xbox 360/Android/Nintendo Switch)
Portal Teaser Trailer
You wake up in an isolated glass cube of a room, surrounded by a chamber of dirtied white panels, a blurred window on the wall revealing a viewing room, but with no other living person to be seen within. The idle tune of the radio in your doorless room is suddenly drowned out by a robotically deadpan voice who welcomes you to the ‘Aperture Science computer-aided Enrichment Center’ and begins explaining that you are ready to begin testing.
But while the voice begins to explain that there may be potential dangers in this test, the lights flash and the voice glitches out, before quickly re-correcting itself, and finally opening up an orange-colored portal in your room so that you may continue to the test chambers ahead. You continue deeper into the mysterious Aperture Science facility, completing more and more tests, all the while being watched by the mysterious robotic voice through security cameras on the walls, with seemingly no other human beings to be found anywhere in the facility…
Portal continues Valve’s trend of innovative gaming experiences by giving the player access to the ‘Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device’, or just ‘Portal Gun’ for short, a device that allows the player to instantly transport anywhere in a 3D space by firing two portals onto any planar surface. Using the portals can be a dizzying experience though, as while putting two portals on one wall is simple enough, dizzying shifts in perspectives and gravity can occur when traveling through them, such as walking into one portal on a wall and then “falling” as you emerge from the other portal on the floor.
Additionally, objects traveling through these portals retain their momentum, so if you jump from a large height into one portal you will go flying at that same speed out of the other! Players must keep their minds sharp while ‘thinking with portals’, which they must use to solve the many puzzles located within the Aperture Science test chambers that our mysterious overseer GLaDOS is putting you through.
Portal was one of the first Valve games I can remember originally playing, and being the kid I was playing through my first Valve games, I was immediately entwined into the world presented to me. The innovative science-fiction aspect of the Portal Gun that allowed for such engaging gameplay, combined with the eerie and mysterious setting of the Aperture facility and the unique characterization of GLaDOS, among the other machines you’ll find within the facility, tied the entire experience together in one big lovely bow that long-time Valve fans at the time would have recognized as being another case of that classic Valve charm that seeps through the veins of every virtual world they create.
Classic Valve charm that, as I was experiencing it for the very first time, immediately sucked me into the world and made me want to experience and learn as much about it as I could. Though arguably one of Valve’s shorter story games, you can still put well over 20-to-30 hours into what many have called a masterpiece of a game, and with the price tag only being $9.99, I can’t recommend that you check out this game as soon as possible if you haven’t already.
With the release of the critically acclaimed bundle of games called ‘The Orange Box’ in 2007, Valve fans began thinking with portals for the first time when Portal debuted as the surprise favorite of the collection.
#5: Team Fortress 2 (PC/Mac/Linux/Formerly PS3 & Xbox 360)
Team Fortress 2 is Free to Play
There are sixty seconds left on the clock as the mercenaries of Builders League United (BLU) and Reliable Excavation Demolition (RED) fight over the last control point on the map. The nine available classes to play in-game wage a bloody war that brings a hail of bullets, explosives, fire, and jars of weaponized urine to an otherwise quiet facility in the middle of dusty New Mexico. Whether your team ends up winning or losing doesn’t matter, because once the round is finished and a winner is decided, the next round will begin just another minute later, and the chaotic fun that put Team Fortress 2 on the map will begin all over again!
There’s no better title to be slotted in the #5 spot than Team Fortress 2, another game that was released with the launch of The Orange Box in 2007 as a direct sequel to the original 1996 Team Fortress, which was designed as a mod for the original Quake engine, similar to how the original Goldsrc engine was based on Quake’s as well.
Currently, TF2’s launch date is a little over a month shy of having been sixteen years ago at the time of writing, and to keep the game fresh since then, Team Fortress 2 has had numerous updates both small and major over the years that have only added onto and improved the original 2007 experience. From new maps and game modes to play, hundreds of different interchangeable weapons that give you plenty of unique ways to play as one of the nine available classes, hundreds of unlockable achievements, and even more hundreds of unique cosmetics that range from snazzy headwear and dapper clothing to haunted voodoo zombie skins that make you call out for brains in a Boston accent, the Team Fortress 2 experience has evolved time and again over the years, creating a game that has cemented itself in history with gameplay that still feels brilliant to play today and one of the most iconic casts of characters ever developed in video game history.
It’s safe to say that TF2 is my favorite game of all time, even beyond just Valve titles specifically. No matter how many years go by or how long a break I take between stopping and playing the game again, TF2 is just one of those games that you can never really put on the shelf forever. And I’m not the only one who still adores TF2 after all these years either, as during the latest summer update from Valve, the game hit a new record of 253,997 simultaneous players on July 14th, which just goes to show that the community this game has built up over the years still holds love for the game as well, even as the game is getting on in years and regular updates continue to come with bigger and bigger gaps between them.
As the years go by and other games come and go like always, TF2 will likely continue to hold a definitely loyal player base for a game this old, and it will continue to leave a legacy of being one of the best online multiplayer experiences a player can have. Being a decade-plus-long fan of the game, I give Team Fortress 2 the highest recommendation I can for anyone who hasn’t played the game yet. And you have no reason not to try it out either, since, after all… It’s free to play! Forever!
“The most fun you can have online” according to PC Gamer, Team Fortress 2 lives on as a testament to excellent multiplayer game design sixteen years after release, and shows no signs of slowing down anytime soon.
#4: Half-Life: Alyx (PC/Linux)
Half-Life: Alyx Announcement Trailer
Set after the events of the original Half-Life and five years before those of Half-Life 2, Half-Life: Alyx returns us to the setting that originally launched Valve’s rocket into gaming stardom back in ‘98 in a brilliant and modern fashion thanks to the Virtual Reality technologies that this game utilizes to continue the franchise’s trend of setting historic standards in the video game history books.
In this installment, you step into the shoes of 19-year-old Alyx Vance, a member of the Resistance against the alien police-state enforcing rulers known as the Combine, and join forces with her father Eli, and fellow Resistance member Russell among others to fight against the oppressive regime of the Combine in your home of City 17, defeating the Overwatch police forces hunting you down while pursuing a rumor that pertains to the fate of the infamous Gordon Freeman…
In 2016, Half-Life: Alyx began its development at Valve by a team of around 80 different developers, which marks the largest dev team for a game Valve has ever had, a third of whom have had worked on previous Half-Life titles, and was developed almost entirely in secret until the public announcement of the game in November of 2019, where the announcement trailer reached 10 million views in under 24 hours. The game was built from the ground up for VR, largely centering around Valve’s own in-house VR headset, the Valve Index, along with the accompanying Knuckles controllers, which means that the entire world of Half-Life: Alyx is intricately designed to be highly interactable in all facets, not just in the usually expected ways for a game.
Virtually every object can be interacted with in various ways, one example being that if you’re using the Index controllers, you can pick up an empty soda can and crush it in your hand before throwing it to distract an enemy. Another example is how you can find construction helmets, or buckets, in the world and use them to protect your head from enemy attacks or to save you from the hanging ‘tongue’ of an alien lifeform called a Barnacle that waits on the ceiling to snatch you up by your neck! With Valve’s signature attention to the little details, Half-Life: Alyx experiences such as going up to a shelf full of clutter and throwing every item on it to the floor are second only to doing so in real life.
I must admit here that Half-Life: Alyx is one of the few Valve games I haven’t personally played, as that $999.00 price tag for the Valve Index is rather significant for someone like me. But having seen plenty of footage of it in the three years since it released I can safely say that, if you can afford the cost, and if you’re either a diehard fan of the Half-Life franchise or you just want to enjoy some award-winning VR gameplay, Half-Life: Alyx is a must-play experience.
The latest Valve release on this list from 2020, Half-Life: Alyx returns us to the world of Half-Life after a twelve-year hiatus with award-winning Virtual Reality gameplay built in the stunning Source 2 Engine.
#3: Portal 2 (PC/Mac/Linux/PS3/Xbox 360/Nintendo Switch)
Portal 2 Teaser Trailer
We find ourselves returning once again to the unsettling halls of Aperture Science after an unknown amount of time since the events of the first game, where the protagonist Chell survived the attempts on her life from the antagonistic AI GLaDOS and defeated the malicious central AI of Aperture Science by destroying her. At the start of Portal 2, we join Chell as yet again she awakes in a new area somewhere within Aperture. We’re swiftly shown that the facility has degraded heavily since the events of the last game, with many areas of the laboratory being destroyed from a lack of oversight and overgrown with various forms of plant life, or flooded with water.
On the brighter side, this time around Chell isn’t all on her own, as early on she meets a spherical robot with an artificial intelligence ‘Personality Core’ named Wheatly who helps guide Chell through the carcass of Aperture Science. Together they journey through the ruins of the facility, passing through many test chambers new and old as they try to find a way to escape the abandoned facility. And maybe along the way, figure out what ultimately happened to GLaDOS…
The Portal series returns with its second installment, and the pace picks right up where it left off in 2007 with an entirely new slate of intelligently designed puzzles, as well as new gameplay mechanics such as Mobility Gels that help you jump higher or run faster, the Aerial Faith Plate that opens up new physics puzzles by sending you flinging across chasms, and the Thermal Discouragement Beam, which is just a fancy way of saying deadly laser beams. Portal 2 also comes with an additional second campaign in the form of the Co-Op mode, where instead of Chell you and a friend take control of two robots, ATLAS and P-body, who must work together to solve an entirely different, cooperatively focused series of test chambers.
Along with the invigorating gameplay, the charming Valve writing returns with a more humorous focus this time around as you delve into this continuation of the Aperture story that’s told by a frankly star-studded voice cast. Ellen McLain returns as the voice of GLaDOS, while Stephen Merchant joins her as the voice of Wheatly, and J. K. Simmons appears as the voice of Cave Johnson, just to name a few examples.
After my experiences with the original Portal, I was easily encaptured once more by the world of Aperture Science in Portal 2, and I just as easily played through it more than once after getting a copy for my Xbox 360 back in the day, while at the same time occasionally being goaded by my younger brother into playing through the Co-Op campaign with him as well.
While certainly, Portal 2’s writing style has a more comical tone compared to the overarching themes of the eerie, mysterious isolation of Portal 1, the usual Valve quality is still present in this sequel, which helps to sell the adventurous feel of the plot as yet another thrilling joyride that you’ll be hard pressed not to want to see all the way through. Just as with the original Portal, Portal 2 sits with an Overwhelmingly Positive status on Steam as well with over 290,000 reviews, further cementing Portal 2 as a must-play if you think you have what it takes to start ‘thinking with portals’ in a brand new way.
“Intelligent, innovative, and massively entertaining.” is what Game Informer Magazine had to say about the highly anticipated 2011 sequel to Valve’s 2007 game of the year.
#2: Half-Life (PC/Mac/Linux/PS2/And a canceled Dreamcast port)
Half-Life (1998) - Official Trailer
Unlike most other protagonists in the FPS genre at the time, instead of being put in the boots of a born-and-bred action hero, Half-Life puts players in control of Gordon Freeman, a regular blue-collar scientist running late to his new job at Black Mesa. Save for the odd sights of nuclear missiles being transported to their launch sites or autonomous robots marching past, hearing the Black Mesa P.A. system in the background announce your arrival as you near your stop makes this feel like just any other commute to work.
But little did the 27-year-old MIT graduate know that within the hour, he’d have been part of the Resonance Cascade event that would cause a rift across time and space, summon deadly alien enemies from another reality to flood the Black Mesa facility, and fling him headlong into a vicious fight for survival that would ultimately make him more important to Earth’s history than he could have ever imagined…
When Half-Life was released in November 1998, it immediately faced critical acclaim from all directions, being called “an instant classic that is miles better than any of its immediate competition” by Computer Gaming World's Jeff Green, the “definitive single player game in a first-person shooter" by IGN, and the "closest thing to a revolutionary step the genre has ever taken" by Gamespot. Half-Life was praised further in numerous reviews for having a revolutionary level of both immersion thanks to its writing and world design and interactivity thanks to the GoldSrc Engine.
Half-Life has been awarded over 50 PC Game of the Year awards since it launched, has been called the greatest PC game of all time in three separate PC Gamer issues from ‘99, ‘01, and ‘05, once in ‘04 by GameSpy when readers voted it the best, and in 2013, IGN wrote that the history of the FPS genre "breaks down pretty cleanly into pre-Half-Life and post-Half-Life eras''. The game is still being discussed here in the 2020s, such as when the Guardian ranked it the third-greatest game of the ’90s. By November of 2008, Half-Life had sold 9.3 million copies in its lifetime. All of these facts and statistics just go to show the level of innovation, passion, and creativity that was poured into the title, and when you sit down and play the game even today, it’s no surprise why the game was critically acclaimed then and is still revered today as we approach its 25th anniversary.
I must admit that the original Half-Life is a game I haven’t actively played until this year alone. It’s blasphemous, I know, to put it off for so long, but I will say that I have seen the game’s main story through various sources over the years, such as the famous Freeman’s Mind YouTube series by Accursed Farms. But what I have played so far I’ve greatly enjoyed, and I can easily see both how it grew to be as famous as it is today, as well as being able to see the groundwork for that now-iconic Valve style that became a staple for the company for decades to come. The base game alone is only $9.99, and will regularly go on sale for as little as $0.99 during events like Winter or Summer sales, so you absolutely shouldn’t put it off any longer and end up a rube like me, and instead hop at the first chance to experience what many claim to be a critical part of video game history.
"Run. Think. Shoot. Live.” This is the tagline for Half-Life, the title that got Valve off the ground with a thunderous start in 1998 when the game revolutionized and changed the FPS genre forever.
But to my credit, while I did take far too long to play the original Half-Life myself, for many years beforehand have I gone and played multiple playthroughs of the #1 game on this list…
#1: Half-Life 2 (PC/Mac/Linux/PS3/Xbox/Xbox 360/Android)
Half-Life 2 Trailer
Aboard yet another train ride commute, Gordon Freeman wakes up to smell the ashes after being released from his stasis sleep by the mysterious G-Man. Gordon quickly realizes he’s been stolen from his point in time and instead placed into a future where the events of the Black Mesa Incident have led to a world that’s ruled with an iron fist by the enigmatic alien force known only as the Combine.
While at first, it seems to be a random chance that he finds himself in City 17, Gordon soon bumps into old friends from his Black Mesa days and quickly finds himself joining forces with the Resistance against Earth’s Combine rulers, where once more Gordon is suddenly placed into the role of a hero. Although this time around, due to his miraculous and perhaps heroic survival of the Black Mesa Incident, Gordon has become somewhat of a legend in the eyes of the Resistance, and the actions he must take to survive in this grim new world only serve to build up that legend. It seems that the right man in the wrong place can make all the difference in the world after all…
Gabe Newell, Valve’s President, wanted to redefine the FPS genre with Half-Life 2, having said "Why spend four years of your life building something that isn't innovative and is basically pointless? If Half-Life 2 isn't viewed as the best PC game of all time, it's going to completely bum out most of the guys on this team." when discussing Half-Life 2. By giving his dev team no time restraints and virtually endless development funds, Half-Life 2’s release did just that by providing gameplay that combined FPS combat and clever physics puzzles, along with new features such as vehicles and physics-based gameplay, inside a masterfully constructed story with brilliant worldbuilding.
Not only are the game’s environments and characters diverse, but so are the enemies you’ll encounter and the means you’ll have to combat them. Such as with the newly introduced Gravity Gun, which for example allows you to pick up heavy objects like filing cabinets or razor-sharp buzzsaws and send them smashing into or slicing through your enemies. The physics engine used in Half-Life 2 provides near-limitless ways to both combat your enemies and progress through the game’s many levels.
Much like most other Valve titles, I’ve played through this game so many times that now I can near-perfectly recognize almost any sound effect used in this game’s sound effect library in any other form of media when I hear it. The memorable characters, fascinating and grim world setting, and gameplay that’s challenging, innovative, and fun all bundled together serve well to make Half-Life 2 a well-deserving sequel to the highly praised Half-Life 1. A fact proven by its 39 Game of the Year awards, various perfect or near-perfect reviews, and even a world record for "Highest Rated Shooter by PC Gamer Magazine" from the Guinness World Records: Gamer's Edition 2008.
Playing Half-Life 2 yourself can easily let you see how the game earned so many of these high-ranking accolades, and how it sold over 6.5 million copies in just 4 years according to a sales report from 2008. So obviously, you should take the time needed if you haven’t already to go out and purchase a copy of Half-Life 2 so you too can experience this masterpiece of a sequel that rocked the world of video games back in 2004, as the franchise yet again redefined what it meant to be a First Person Shooter.
Developed alongside the incredible Source Engine, Half-Life 2 was released in 2004 and thrusts both players and Gordon Freeman 20 years into an unfamiliar future ruled by authoritarian alien overlords.
Conclusion
That’s it for today’s list. I hope you gained as much enjoyment from reading it as I did when researching and writing for it.
If you didn’t see your favorite Valve title on this list, or you just want a chance to talk about them in length as I have today, then feel free to let me know what your thoughts are in a comment below.
I always love to hear back from readers, so please don’t be too shy to voice your thoughts!
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