Game Summary:

The Orange Box includes all the content of The Black Box for PC, plus the original Half-Life 2 and Half-Life 2: Episode One. Innovative games featured in The Orange Box include Half-Life 2: Episode Two, the second installment in Valve's episodic trilogy advances the award-winning story, leading the player to new locations outside of City 17, as well as the pioneering type of single-player action game Portal, which rewrites the rules for how players approach and manipulate their environment, and Team Fortress 2 -- an all-new version of the legendary title that spawned team based multiplayer action games with a daring new art style features the most advanced graphics of any Source-based game released to date.

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Game Review:

The Orange Box is a collection of four “M” rated first person shooter games and one “T” rated puzzle game. The bundle is available for PC, Microsoft Xbox360 and Sony’s PS3.

The Orange Box contains full-versions of:
➢ Half Life 2
➢ Half-Life 2: Episode One
➢ Half-Life 2: Episode Two
➢ Portal
➢ Team Fortress 2

All games received overwhelmingly positive reviews by mainstream and enthusiast media. The Orange Box has also been praised for being a great value – five whole games for the price of one.

Read on for a synopsis of each individual game included in the The Orange Box.

HALF LIFE 2
Half-Life 2 follows the character of Gordon Freeman. Staged in and around the fictional “City 17”, he must fight against an alien force known as the “Combine”. Players will make their way through a linear series of levels, encountering both human troops and hostile alien creatures.
Players will use standard weapons like pistols and shotguns, in addition to futuristic weapons such as a gravity gun. The Gravity Gun plays a crucial function throughout the game, granting the player an unprecedented amount of creativity in its use, such as picking up and throwing objects at enemies, holding objects indefinitely for use as makeshift cover, grabbing healthkits and ammunition from out-of-reach places, returning enemies’ grenades, building makeshift bridges, making crude stairs out of crates, flipping over an overturned buggy, or manipulating objects through Combine forcefields.

HALF LIFE: EPISODE ONE
Half-Life 2: Episode One is a stand-alone game.
While being a continuation of Half-Life 2, it does not require the original game to be installed (PC). It takes advantage of several major upgrades to the Source engine since the release of Half-Life 2, primarily its rendering capabilities and the upgraded facial animation system.
The episode takes place immediately after the end of Half-Life 2, in and around the war-torn setting of City 17. Episode One continues to follow scientist Gordon Freeman and his companion Alyx Vance as they deal with the events of Half-Life 2 and humanity’s continuing struggle against the Combine.

HALF LIFE: EPISODE TWO
Episode Two focuses on expansive environments, travel and less linear play. Following the closing events of Episode One, it sees all of the series’ major players moving away from City 17 to the surrounding wilderness. Seven chapters tell the story of Gordon Freeman and Alyx Vance’s journey to a large Resistance base called White Forest. Episode Two has more puzzles compared to Episode One and focuses on the use of vehicles.

PORTAL
Portal consists primarily of a series of puzzles that must be solved by teleporting the player’s character and other simple objects using a “portal gun”. The unit can create an inter-spatial portal between flat planes. The goal of each puzzle is to reach an exit point. The portal gun and the unusual physics it creates are the emphasis of this game. Portal is Valve’s professionally-developed spiritual successor to the freeware game Narbacular Drop, the 2005 independent game released by students of the DigiPen Institute of Technology; the original Narbacular Drop team are now all employed at Valve.

TEAM FORTRESS 2
Team Fortress 2 is a multiplayer team-based first-person shooter. The game is built around two opposing, but equal teams competing for an objective. Team Fortress 2 does not attempt the realistic graphical approach used in other Valve games. But rather uses a more stylized, cartoon-like approach. The game ships with six maps and is played online.

Bottom Line,
“The Orange Box” is an outstanding, value priced collection of critically acclaimed shooter games – blood, gore and some mild swearing included.