This is the first ever game I played created by Valve, the main thing that started off my entire die-hard obsession with the franchise and the company, without this game, I wouldn't have met up with people I know and friends with to this day, I basically owe my entire life to it. Literally. I played through it countless times and I remember EVERYTHING that happens in there, I played through it in every shape or form, but the vanilla game is just great.

In Half-Life 2 you play as Dr. Gordon Freeman, a Ph.D. wielding silent character which is the main protagonist of the franchise, he is literally on the cover art for Half-Life and Half-Life 2 depending on the copy you got! He's a blank canvas letting you imagine who he is really, you just know he got a Ph.D. in Theoretical Physics and was a MIT Graduate(WAS because, well, the world has gone to shit the moment you go into the main story line).

In this game, you are humanity's sign of hope and basically the main antagonist of Half-Life 2 and its episodes capable who is the only person who knows how it was before the Combine and how to send them back

Breen is the main antagonist of Half-Life 2, he was your administrator back in Black Mesa and basically the leader of all cities on Earth and resides in the Citadel, localted in City 17, the place we get put into. He's the main person who spews propaganda to the people relayed by the combine, he's seen everywhere and basically leads the combine units.

He was the person who brought the human race a"last chance"and allows them to live longer even under oppresion. Without him, humanity wouldn't have existed, however, the people hate him, so they want to kill him and take down the combine.

The Combine is the main antagonist of the entire game, they're this presense which enslaves every living being they find and control them to their liking while draining their resources. The war they had with humanity was 7 hours long before they surrendered.

They're like, i don't know, REALLY EVIL or something, I can't really tell. Jokes aside, they're the thing you're gonana be constantly fighting against throughout the franchise onward, even the Vortigaunts aka. Alien Slaves you fought in Half-Life are now on your side to defeat them alongside the rebels.

Eli wants you to bang his daughter.

A scientist who worked in the Black Mesa, he's a person whos working Alyx and Barney to get more citizens out of City 17 to turn them into refugees and rebels.

He's basically a nerd just like you. He has a laboratory you enter and also helps you throughout the journey.

Alyx Vance is a character you meet early on before meeting Kleiner in person, she's Eli Vance's daughter and she's pretty smart considering he state of the world, she worked with Kleiner build a teleporter which we use once.

She accompanies you at the point where you're on the way to the Citadel before being abducted by soldiers and finally at the last chapter to defeat Breen.

She has a weapon called the Alyx Gun and a tool which allows her to bypass the combine technology.

Barney Calhoun is a familiar face from Half-Life since we played as him once in one of the expansions created by Gearbox. He's an undercover MetroCop who gets people to become part of the refuges and stuff, by the story we learn that Barney and Gordon are close friends and have done stuff together, he even owed him a beer.

By the way, isn't the beer bottles outside the crate area the beer he owed him? Like, honestly, we make jokes about him still owing beer, but didn't he already give him the beer?

_{Hey, thats the beer!}

These are your fellow mates who help you out, they're your allies and help you get throughout the entirety of the campaign.

They wield stuff as small as pistols to full-fledged RPG's.

They can talk with Vortigaunts and to eachother, which is fun, they can also say funny things to you.

I adore those guys, even though they get into your way most of the time, as a fun fact, the males are voiced by John Patrick Lowrie, the voice of Sniper from Team Fortress 2

The metropolice, metrocops for short, are the early enemies you fight against in the main parts of City 17. You interact with them for basically half of the entire game, they can be either alone or in groups, they have a basic arsenal of a pistol and a SMG as well as the manhacks, they're easy to kill since they have a small health pool and a pretty easy AI.

They're people who have joined the Combine to get better food, living conditions and can have mechanical sex and all that.

Their families are also in better conditions, however, if they fail or die, they get executed. Cruel, however, we basically kill 5% of the population like that, just killing metrocops.

They can drop medkits, ammo and even batteries.

Combine Soldiers are the enemies we encounter after the Ravenholm chapter. They're modified humans who rose up ranks in the combine and have been turned into cyborgs, and thanks to that, they're beefier and are now carrying AR2's and shotguns, they still carry SMG's from time to time.

If you played the original game from 2004 or before Episode One, you only had 2 variants, the normal one and the prison guard variant which you encounter in the Nova Prospekt chapter, however, Valve added a new type, the shotgunner variant, which made it easy to differentiate them as before if you played aggresively you had to pray that if you went against one that they were the SMG one and not the shotgunner, as they can basically tank your health quickly.

They can now do squad tactics against the players and it's sometimes pretty scary when they actually manage to pull them off since they can easilly tank you down to 20 health and make you be in a open enough area with no cover. However, a crazy man who is just holding the forward and sprint key can basically kill them before they plan out something. At some point in the Citadel part we can see the last variant of the soldier, the Elites, they wield AR2's and can use the Alt fire to fire energy balls, they wear white uniforms and have a red recticle instead of the normal 2 eyes, but by that time they're pretty useless since you can kill them with the hyper-charged Gravity Gun.

The Elite soldier can drop energy ball packs on death. Not sure, if anyone knows more, E-Mail me if i'm wrong.

The Hunter-chopper is one of those enemies that is basically sort of considered as a boss in the entire game. It cannot be taken with any weapons other than the cannon used on them which is mounted on the mudskipper. It appears atleast once in the game and basically stalks you in Water Hazard, you get to "race" it at one point via the said mudskipper.

It's equiped with a cannon which charges up and fires quickly in large amounts but with very low accuracy, if you're not taking cover and depending on how the projectiles hit, you can die pretty easily.

hey can drop bombs in a line or cover the entire area beneath them with bombs, you can tell what they will do depending on if they start blaring alarms or not.

The Gunship is one of the enemies which is tricky to take care of, they're a synth with a gun strapped to them, they can easilly kill you if you're not utilizing cover, they also appear prominently in the Highway 17, the final chapter and in the beginning while running away from the metropolice.

The only possible way to take them down is using the RPG, however, you cannot just point at it and shoot, it will easily shoot down the rocket, so you need to swirl your rocket around it so that you can land it on them. All I can say is that they're pretty fun to fight against, even if the only way to take them down is via rockets.

The Scanners are basically flying things that blind you, thats it, there's not much you can say about them.

Okay, maybe I can write up a bit more about them, they can blind you for 5 seconds and are pretty much the first annoyance you have to get rid of if present, or just don't look at them, I dunno. If you use explosive weapons against it, it will enter into it's dive state and will try to kamikaze into you, exploding upon impact. They can get you a single battery on kill.

The other variant is a Shield Scanner, these guy's can blind you as well, but they can also drop hoppers, which are basically mines.

Hoppers are basically mines, they hook into the ground and the only way to get them off is by using the gravity gun. Upon picking up via the gravity gun, you can put them down and they will be attacking anything thats a part of the combine, or use them like makeshift explosives by launching them at enemies via the Gravity Gun. By the way, when they get "tripped", they will launch towards the thing that activated it, no matter how far it is.

God, these little pricks, I hate them so much, like, SOOOOOO MUCH. Why did valve had to add them? They're sometimes super annoying to deal with, you just cannot avoid them slash n' dashing you with the best way of dealing with them is just by using the crowbar, the shotgun or something explosive.

Basically, they're drones that have blades attached to them and are used to kill things with ease in areas inaccessible by the units. Manhacks are easily heard if theyre in proximity due to the annoying drone that accompanies them, at points they're pretty slow but in rare cases they can be pretty fast.

They appear during Route Kanal and start appearing onward, they dissapear in Ravenholm but reappear in the Uprising.

The dropship is basically the main way the combine deploys its units across places, they're flying things that can carry either an APC or a container with units inside, they can also carry anything, as its once shown when you abandon your scout car and it gets picked up by one of these.

There's not much to talk about them except that they appear in a certain map and create a standoff type of situation where you fight off combine units deployed by them.

She doesnt deserve a description, fuck her, shes so unimportant. She basically envys you and shes right, fuck her, she's worthless compared to the traumatized Ph.D man

The man, the Government Man, the MYSTERIOUS MAN, the Garry Man. He's something, maybe even It, he follows you everywhere, watching you from a far and leaves when you take notice of him, we don't know what it is, but we know that he's the one who put you here ofr something he wants to be done and also who took you back. Nobody knows who he is, but he has employers.