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IT HAS BEEN A long time coming. Ever since players finished the first Half-Life the question has always been, When is the story going to continue? Left with that cliff-hanger ending of the choice the G-Man gives you it was clear there was more to tell about the alien incursion to Earth and the hows and whys of it. The bodies found in Xan clearly indicated that the aliens had been interferred with first by the humans but what were they after? And why did they rile enough to launch a full-scale invasion?

These questions hung, festering quietly in the minds of FPS fans for years. Valve said nothing and to all intents and purposes appeared to be resting on the laurels they had garnered from the release of Half-Life. How wrong could we have been! Now with the release of this long awaited sequel imminent Valve can finally reveal that not only did they not rest on their laurels but that their aim was to push the genre forward just as much as they did with the release of the original. Valve has been beavering away ever since, testing technology and generally trying to decide what exactly would be the aim of the sequel. It must have been maddening to work on this and know that something special was coming but not be able to tell a soul outside the company.

The flip side is that when we finally did get to see Half-Life 2 it was nearly feature-complete and as a result gave a polished and downright impressive showing. If you haven't done already, then nick over to www.hl2.co.nz and download the bink format movie files showing the game in action. Yes they are quite a few megabytes in length but even the modem users should be happy to have spent the time hauling it down. They are, in a word, stunning. Still screenshots simply don't show half of what makes the game quite so impressive to behold.

So what exactly has us anticipating this game so much?

For starters the strong sense of storytelling that Valve brought to the FPS genre is set to continue (although Ritual's much maligned Sin slightly predates Half-life and told a strong story in but was marred by a rushed and buggy final product), as demonstrated in the "Kliener's Laboratory" movie (where the character Alyx is busy relating to Gordon her reasons for wanting to get back at the alien Combine forces). Technology-wise, Valve has spent a lot of effort moving away from the somewhat stiff in-game character models and has tried very hard to give the computer characters expressive facial movement. NPCs can smile, grimace, waggle an eyebrow and look lecherously at you - and anything else expressible on the human face. As a result, people can actively look nervous when heading into situations they know are dire, and look relieved to see you. The storytelling potential is enormous to pull the user in and make you actually care about the people you are interacting with.

Next to impress is the solid integration of a physics engine into the game. Unreal Tournament 2003 did indeed use the Karma physics engine with rag doll death animations but physics simulation has largely stayed out of the game itself. Half-life 2 looks set to change this with a heavy integration. Objects can be stacked and then when the bottom object is knocked out the tower will indeed fall down. Doors can be blocked by placing a table behind them to slow the computer AI down. Depending on densities, objects will float or sink in water. Using a special gravity manipulation tool, items can be flung around either directly at enemies or to trigger collapses on to them. The AI has been taught to use this against you too.

Perhaps most impressive was to see a mattress being draped over a random pile of objects, deforming realisticlly to match what it was draped over. Valve seem to be working hard to use this fairly wide-ranging physics simulation to enhance the gameplay with traps, puzzles and general environmental detail.

Finally, Half-life 2 looks to be the first major game to use Direct X 9 features, in particular pixel and vertex shaders. Don't worry if your card doesn't support them - Valve has taken care to ensure the game's graphics scale to match the capabilities of your card and machine. But for those with high-end GeForce FX or Radeon cards, this will be the first mass market title to really show us why Direct X 9 is such a leap forward.

With pixel shaders, running water will ripple and refract convincingly, fires will burn with more defined individual licks of flame, some weaponry will distort the air around them producing a 'distortion well' effect, eyes will have individual radiosity calculations to make them glint and have catch lights. It is no accident that ATi and Valve have teamed together, as this game promises to be the one that really shows us what to expect from the faster graphics cards that have, until recently, had their more advanced features left largely untapped.

We won't expect Half-life 2 to be anything other than what it sets out to be - a solid single-player FPS. But as you can see from the technology features above, Valve has been working hard to give us a game that should be a lot more than the sum of its parts. What excites us even more than the game itself is the knowledge that Valve, as with the first Half-Life, is very mod friendly and the thought of what the mod community can do with the features this game brings to the table is an extremely exciting one indeed.

Show me the screenshots!