One thing that continues to bug me about the Half-Life 2 saga is just how little time you spend in City 17. With Half-Life 2, Valve created what I consider to be the greatest setting for a video game ever: a carbonated, dust-decayed Eastern European metropolis turned into a massive human internment camp by the enslavers of humanity. Yet in Half-Life 2, you spend all of a couple of hours actually wandering through City 17. The design of the game outside of the first fifteen minutes never allows you to just wander around, absorbing the atmosphere: they quickly blast you off to sand dunes and weird ghost towns which are strangely less compelling than the first level of the game.

Episode One somewhat helps this, but even so, a lot of the game is spent in underground tunnels and parking garages. And, spoilers, so hit the next paragraph to save yourself any potential pain! You're not going to be able to wander around City 17 in the future episodes, because they done nuked the place at the end of Episode One.

But I largely enjoyed Episode One: it felt like a more concentrated and focussed Half-Life 2. In fact, even though I didn't quite care for it on release, it's gotten me so jonesing for more City 17 that I think I will pick amongst HL2's scraps just to soak in the scant atmosphere of HL2's brilliant but curiously underused game setting.

What about you? What will you be playing? What the heck was even released this week? Florian Eckhardt

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