REVIEW: The Orange Box

Ok, so the Orange Box was released at the end of last year on consoles, but we think it’s worth a mention for anybody who has recently bought an PlayStation 3 or Xbox 360.

The Orange Box isn’t a game, it’s five games boxed as one – Half-Life 2, Half-Life 2: Episode One, Half-Life 2: Episode Two, Portal, and the multiplayer Team Fortress 2. If you’re not a PC gamer, you might have played Half-Life when it got off to a poor console start on PlayStation 2, the game was just about playable compared to the award-winning PC version, but things have changed since then.

Half-Life has been a standard setter since its first PC release in 1998. Half-Life 2 was long delayed but well worth the wait, again getting critical acclaimed. Then, since its launch, games developer Valve switched to a ‘episode’ based releases using their Steam download system – the Orange Box partly acts as catch up for console users.

Half-Life 2, Episode One, and Episode Two are your standard-setting first person shooters. Think highly developed storyline, impressive graphics, and never-ending action mixed in with a range of weapons and enemies, and you’re just about there. 

Portal is puzzle game like you never. As with the original Half-Life, you’re our stuck in a weapons research and development. But there’s a twist. It looks like a first person shooter, but the game does not have any guns you can pick up.

Instead you have a portal shooter, getting place-to-place or disabling automatic guns requires a bit of thinking. Did we mention the computer which controls the compound has gone crazy and is trying to kill you? If you could call Orange Box a game it would be game of the year 2007, but, since it’s not a game, it is the best every value the games industry has ever seen.

Out on PS3, Xbox 360, & PC