The Orange Box
2007
- shooter
- puzzle
- action
- science fiction
- comedy
- single player
- multiplayer
- co-operative
The story
The Orange Box is a bundle that includes five titles from Valve: Half-Life 2; Half-Life 2:Episode 1; Half-Life 2: Episode Two; Team Fortress 2, the sequel to the game that put class-based, multiplayer team warfare on the map; and Portal, the game that blends puzzles, first person action, and adventure gaming to produce an experience like no other.
What it’s like
Grey, grimy urban decay gives way to bright, saturated cartoon colour, and the whole bundle moves between two very different moods. The Half-Life 2 chapters run on wet concrete, rust, dust-hazed industrial halls and sun-scorched coastal wasteland, with long stretches of ambient drone, distant alarms and sparse, tense strings that swell only when something is about to go wrong. Portal is clinical instead: white test chambers under cold fluorescent light, a dry, deadpan voice counting down the rooms, and a soundtrack of soft, quirky ambient that reads as cheerfully unsettling. Team Fortress 2 is the outlier, a loud, cartoonishly stylised shooter with bold silhouettes, exaggerated animation and comic bursts of noise. Across the set the pacing is patient and exploratory in the single-player games, with quiet walks between firefights, and fast and chaotic in multiplayer. Violence is present throughout and cartoonish in TF2 but more grounded and bloody in Half-Life 2, while Portal is almost entirely bloodless and light. Best for players who like atmospheric sci-fi with a dry sense of humour, puzzle-solving in sterile spaces, and team shooters with a playful, colourful edge.
More games like The Orange Box
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