Half-Life 2 is a 2004 first-person shooter (FPS) game developed and published by Valve Corporation. It was published for Windows on Valve's digital distribution service, Steam. Like the original Half-Life (1998), Half-Life 2 combines shooting, puzzles, and storytelling, and adds new features such as vehicles and physics-based gameplay. The player controls Gordon Freeman, who joins a resistance to liberate Earth from the Combine, an interplanetary alien empire.
Box art featuring Gordon Freeman
A screenshot of the player engaging a group of antlions with a Pulse-Rifle/AR2. Along the bottom of the screen, the player's health, suit charge level, and their ammunition is displayed.
Valve president Gabe Newell in 2007
A square in City 17, showing the Source engine's lighting and shadow effects
A first-person shooter (FPS) is a video game centered on gun fighting and other weapon-based combat seen from a first-person perspective, with the player experiencing the action directly through the eyes of the main character. This genre shares multiple common traits with other shooter games, and in turn falls under the action games category. Since the genre's inception, advanced 3D and pseudo-3D graphics have proven fundamental to allow a reasonable level of immersion in the game world, and this type of game helped pushing technology progressively further, challenging hardware developers worldwide to introduce numerous innovations in the field of graphics processing units. Multiplayer gaming has been an integral part of the experience, and became even more prominent with the diffusion of internet connectivity in recent years.
A player engaging in combat during an above-ground section in Half-Life
More 21st century first-person shooters utilize the Internet for multiplayer features, but local area networks were commonly used in early games.
2011 shooter Xonotic