We've all been horribly misled about Episode Two. We ended Episode One steaming out of City 17 on a train as the Citadel exploded, but it crashed and we heard Alyx cry out. The next thing we saw was her dangling from a smashed bridge in the Episode Two trailer, then her limp body being carried by a Vortigaunt. And OK, the savvy among us probably realised she wasn't dead, but it was pretty clear she'd been badly hurt in the crash and would be out of action for most of the episode.
Utterly untrue. First, I should just say that if you don't want to know anything about what's in Episode Two, you shouldn't be reading a preview of Episode Two. Still reading? Good. Alyx's jeans are a little scuffed at the knees after the crash, but that's about the extent of the damage. She helps you out of the train wreck (using the gravity gun! Brilliant!), and you spend almost the entire episode with her at your side. In fact, she sticks with you more than ever, hopping in and out of your vehicle and fighting alongside you in the kind of climactic battles she used to sit out of.
The lion's share of Episode Two - which at seven hours is what Valve call the "meat" of the trilogy - is an epic road-trip to a rebel safe haven called White Forest. You and Alyx are driving and scrambling across mountainous, forested terrain, away from the spectacular smouldering ruins of City 17, but it's not easy going. A convoy of heavy Combine forces is racing you to White Forest, you're deep in Antlion country, and the Portal Storms that ravaged Earth in the first place have started up again. These green rifts let in Xen's monsters - headcrabs and the like - to soften up the Resistance, in preparation for a larger portal to the Combine dimension to bring their real forces through.
Last time, these storms decimated the world's combined military. This time, we don't have a military. In Eli's words, "It's the Seven Hour War all over again, only this time we won't last seven minutes." The only way to stop them is to get the data packet Alyx stole in Episode One to the Rebellion's best minds at White Forest. It's not clear what Drs Vance, Kleiner and pompous new guy Magnusson are planning, except that it involves building a rocket. But that packet contains the data the Combine used to open these portals, so it's your only hope of closing them.
Alyx is great at taking cover - and even blind-firing - now.
As for Antlion country... you know how they burst up from the ground, having burrowed towards you via a network of underground tunnels? That's where you'll be going. These tunnels are rather pretty thanks to new flashlight shadows (think Doom 3) and a special shader-effect Valve have devised specifically for bio-luminescence (you have to love them for that). But in and around them, you'll be hounded by the hideous new Worker Antlions. When I tell you these spit poison, you'll probably imagine the half-hearted hocking of the Bullsquids in the original Half-Life. This is more like a Howitzer. Their venom is so corrosive and spat with such force that it actually smashes through almost anything between you and it. If it hits you - and it usually does - the liquid blinds you and the venom burns through your health. And in case that doesn't make them hard enough to fight, they hop around like hyperactive locusts.
But the real star of Episode Two is our covergirl: the Hunter, a three-legged Combine killing machine smaller than a Strider, and agile enough to chase you into buildings. How agile? One chased me into the building I was hiding in by jumping through the upstairs window. The rather uninspired pulse-rifle type attack you saw them use in the trailer was another red herring, you'll be pleased to hear. They now fire a three-round-burst of phosphorescent charges, which thud into the scenery and fizzle there ominously. After a few seconds, they detonate in a sparkling blue blast that burns you and knocks you back. And if they hit you directly, you're in for a lot worse.
When they've got you cornered, Hunters regard you with curiousity rather than anger.
The genius of this attack is that it means nowhere is safe. Your instinct is to duck behind cover and peek out to take potshots, and Alyx's new AI means she does the same. It doesn't work. When those flares come thwacking in on railgun-like spirals of cyan vapour, you've got three seconds to vacate the premises or die.
Eventually you realise that it's actually safer to charge recklessly out into the open and jump around the Hunter like a lunatic; if you keep moving, you can avoid almost all of their time-delayed explosions. The trouble is that they're also terrifyingly fast, and can ram you like an Antlion Guard if you don't keep sidestepping. They're also tough, and ammo is scarce, so pretty soon you're using the gravity gun to suck up anything hard from the log cabins and barns around you and pelt your angry tripod assailant with it. The violent whirlwind you end up dancing is fantastic fun, and the feel of these fights becomes a lot like the most frenetic clashes of Half-Life 2: Deathmatch. They're the best fights since the original Half-Life's devious marines.
This continuous convoy of Combine is headed the same place you are: White Forest. Ulp.
Luckily you've also got that modified muscle car to ram them back with. It's faster, sexier and better-handling than Half-Life 2's rather rickety wireframe buggy, and your trips in it are made a lot more entertaining by having Alyx in the passenger seat. She cries out when you're about to hit a tree, whoops when you jump off a ramp, and hops in and out intelligently enough that you never need to think about whether she's with you. A couple of times I realised I was driving off forgetting her, but she was already clambering in, Dukes-of-Hazzard-style, as I pulled away. And if you think you're in love with her now, wait until a Fast Zombie leaps on your bonnet, claws at your face, then finds itself rudely dispatched by a lithe leg to its crab-smothered head, shooting out from the passenger seat. Good God, does this woman know how to charm a gamer.
In Episode One we got a glimpse of an Arctic base where Mossman was searching for the data packet, and project lead David Speyrer confirms that we'll be seeing a bit more of that in Episode Two. Valve's coffee-table book on the making of Half-Life 2, Raising The Bar, includes a detailed description of a climactic battle there, which was cut before it got made. But it brought to mind something Valve said long ago about Half-Life 2's Citadel: they always want you to see where you're going to end up, a long time before you get there. You can see where I'm going with this.
The Combine are opening these huge portals all over the planet.
Valve were being typically coy about all plot details, but I told them my theory anyway: that Episode Three would be set at this Arctic base and feature the huge climactic battle described. I was expecting the usual "We're not talking about that," but chief PR man Doug Lombardi just smiled, and said: "That would be exciting, wouldn't it?"
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