Half-Life 2
BANGER · Shooter · 2004
Steam Deck VerifiedThe verdict
BUY IT.
A BANGER at $9.99.
- Length
- 12.9h
- Value
- $0.77/hr
- Reviews
- 98% positive
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Minimum on the Steam store: 512 MB of memory, DirectX 8.1 level Graphics Card (requires support for SSE), 6.4 GB of storage. Runs on Windows, Linux.
Reawakened from stasis in the occupied metropolis of City 17, Gordon Freeman is joined by Alyx Vance as he leads a desperate human resistance. Experience the landmark first-person shooter packed with immersive world-building, boundary-pushing physics, and exhilarating combat.
What drives the score
How to read this
Every input gets a grade, S to D, read from the buyer's side. The score is multiplicative, so an input only counts as raising when it sits near the top of its own scale. Anything with real room left is holding the score back, because that room is the gap to 100. ▲ marks a lift, ▼ a drag or a dock, ? an input we do not have, • a fact this genre's score does not use. The exact weights stay secret.
The value story
The lowest price on record is $0.99, set in June 2017. Its cuts run 80 percent off as a rule. There have been 56 in the 14 years tracked, about 12 weeks apart. Today it is at full price. The last sale was about 13 weeks ago, and on this game's rhythm the next one tends to arrive within 12 weeks.
Against its own genre it lands in the top 1 percent on value. It is better reviewed than 99 percent of its genre. The nearest things to it, Half-Life: Source ($9.99, scores 25) and Half-Life ($9.99, scores 95), are both worse buys on this math.
The math says it holds its tier up to $19.44, and you are being asked for $9.99.
Steam's global achievement data says about 2 percent of players ever finish it. On a 12.9-hour game, that is a lot of paid-for hours most people never see. Of the 799 Steam-purchase reviews this site sampled, 2 come from buyers who refunded the game, sampled from reviews written November 2025 to September 2026. Inside the two-hour refund window, 94 percent of the 11,776 reviews written there were positive, against 98 percent overall, and those are 6 percent of everything written about it.
22 years after release it still had 1.6K people in it at once.
Valve rates it Steam Deck Verified, and at 12.9 hours it is short enough to finish on one.
The drop-off
71% start to 2% finishMost players never reach the end. On a 12.9-hour game, that's a lot you pay for and may never use. Steam global achievements
Players
1,555 players at peak in the last day.
The chart appears once this game has been counted more than once.Player counts via SteamSpy.
What players say
I would recommend this landmark game to anyone who likes first person shooters. Truly one of the best video games of all time. 7/10 IGN, Too Much Water (Hazard).
Absolutely legendary game, still amazing in 2026 with super fluid gameplay and atmospheres that feel incredibly liminal if you like that vibe. So good I replay it every so often and torture myself getting those incredibly difficult achievements like "Keep off the Sand!" where you can't touch the sand for a WHOLE lvl or "Go get some grub" where you gotta squash bugs XD
After completing Half-Life and now playing Half-Life 2, I finally understand why these are some of the highest praised titles there are. Gameplay is actual peak. Even almost 30 years after release and over 22 years since HL2, it is a super interesting action movie style experience, especially on hard for the first try. A "Must Play" game!
Player reviews from Steam: the most helpful all-time, plus the newest that clear the same quality bar, with the hours each player had put in when they wrote it. The mix of Recommended and Not recommended follows the game's Steam ratio. Rotates daily. Opinions are theirs.
Cite this score
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Half-Life 2 scores 97/100 on the BANG Score (a BANGER). The BANG Score rates what a game is worth for the money. Via Steam BANGERS. https://steambangers.com/game/220/half-life-2The BANG Score is one number for value, 0 to 100: price against how it reviews and how long it was built to be. It answers the money question and stops there; whether the game is for you is still your call.
Reviews set the ceiling and price moves you inside it, so a cheap game that reviews badly cannot climb. Ratings from few reviewers are shrunk toward the middle, so 100 percent from nine people does not outrank 96 percent from ninety thousand. Length comes from HowLongToBeat where it can be matched, measured against a per-genre floor so a five-hour narrative game is judged against other narrative games rather than against a sixty-hour RPG. Where no verified length exists the score says so and carries a dock, because the biggest input is then a guess. The full method, including where it is weak → Steam reviews as of Sep 10, price as of Sep 24.
A number here look wrong? Tell me what it got wrong and I will look at the inputs behind it.