We’d hate to make ourselves look redundant here but… it’s five great games for less than 50 quid. Do you really need a review to help you decide whether or not The Orange Box is worth your while? Hell, even if you’ve already played Half-Life 2 and Episode One on the PC and don’t want to play them again on your PS3, you’ll still be getting plenty of top-notch entertainment for your money. But perhaps you’re wondering if there’s a catch, or perhaps you’re just curious to know more about this extraordinary compilation. We hope so, we’d hate to think of these four pages being left alone and unread.

The main bulk of this huge package is taken up by a straight port of Half-Life 2. It is nothing more and nothing less than the all-time classic that was first released on the PC back in 2004. On the one hand, this is obviously a really good thing. Everything that’s awesome about the game has been kept 100 per cent intact in the process of the conversion. But there is a downside, too. For a start, Half- Life 2 is now three years old, and three years is a very long time in gaming, especially when a new console generation comes along in the middle of it. Much, although admittedly not all, of what made this a ground-breaking milestone back in 2004 already looks pretty dated.

The resolution of textures, the lighting and the overall visual quality really isn’t up to the usual PlayStation 3 standards, although the water effects and many of the character animations are still as good as, if not better than, any that we’ve seen this year. It’s a similar story with the physics. Valve’s Source engine throws objects around at a level of realism far beyond anything seen prior to its introduction in 2004, but game physics have continued to improve at a dramatic rate since then, and so Half-Life 2 can sometimes feel a little bit crude and clumsy by today’s standards. In particular, we had frequent problems with small objects, such as pieces of broken crate, impeding our progress and catching on us when really we ought to have easily been able to walk over them or kick them out of the way. There are no major problems, but it wouldn’t really have hurt too much to have tidied this kind of issue up slightly, would it?

It also wouldn’t have hurt to make some effort to adapt it better to a console control setup. Vehicle control, in particular, can feel very wayward and counter-intuitive. Steering, looking and aiming your vehicle’s weapon are all controlled separately, which may have made some sort of sense when using a mouse and keyboard, but makes none at all on a PS3 pad. There was an opportunity here for Valve to streamline the whole system and make it work better on a console than it did on the PC, but it wasn’t taken. A bit of a shame.

Another thing that Valve has failed to do is account for the fact that joypads use analogue movement control where the cursor keys on a PC do not. In order to prevent you from stopping and starting with an unnatural abruptness, a degree of inertia has been added to your movement so that you effectively take about a second to slow down and speed up whenever you stop or start moving. The trouble is that this occurs naturally with analogue control, but Valve hasn’t toned down the artificial effect to compensate for this, so on the PS3 you always feel like you have a little bit too much inertia, like you’re slightly drunk or something. It wouldn’t matter in a regular FPS, but Half-Life 2 has some platform puzzleresque sections that sometimes require fairly precise control. Still, it’s not a very big deal, and we’re only going into these minor niggles in such depth because if, for some reason, you’re actually in any doubt as to whether or not to buy The Orange Box, these are probably the kind of things you’d like to know about. You shouldn’t let any of this put you off though. It might be a little bit dated and a little awkward, but Half-Life 2 is still one of the best games ever on any platform. Its minor issues bring the whole package down to 93% from a 96% or 97%, that’s all.

Speaking of the whole package, there are four more games to tell you about. None of which are full-sized, but they’re all much more than mere modes or mini-games. First up you’ve got Episode One and Episode Two, which continue the Half-Life 2 story from where the main game leaves off. Both play much like the main game with, if anything, hints of refinement and polish here and there. Episode One looks very much the same as Half-Life 2, but Episode Two, being more or less brand new, looks noticeably better. It’s still pretty much the same engine underneath, but the resolution and lighting are much improved, taking the game’s atmosphere to impressive new heights. Its numerous outdoor locations are convincingly sunlit, and the murky subterranean sections suitably shadowy and damp.

The purpose of both episodes isn’t just to give you some more of the gaming action that you already know and love, it’s to develop the characters, their stories and their relationships. Through much of both episodes you’ll be closely accompanied by Alyx Vance, which tells you a lot about Valve’s growing confidence in its ability to create characters that are truly worthwhile, valuable even, in their own right. Alyx is arguably the first and only AI companion in the history of games that just somehow refuses to get annoying. She doesn’t get in the way (although she will shove you if you get in her’s), she doesn’t get stuck on scenery and lag behind, she doesn’t keep repeating the same irritating phrases over and over, she doesn’t run right in front of you when you’re shooting, and she doesn’t run off ahead getting herself killed. She just does everything a companion should – helps, advises, chats, co-operates and… and… she actually really cares about you, man. She’s also probably the most convincing and believable character ever seen in a videogame and, what’s more, works as a superb device for telling the story and engaging you in it. The fact is that from a storytelling point of view Gordon Freeman isn’t the main character – he’s barely even a character at all – it’s Alyx. The story’s meaning and emotion is conveyed almost entirely through Alyx and her relationships with others – most importantly with Freeman, but also with her father, with Dog and with Dr Kleiner – and it’s very effective indeed. We really like Alyx as a game device and, although it’s strangely uncomfortable to say this, we think we really like her as a person as well.

Lest we forget, we also really like Portal and Team Fortress 2, the two Half-Life spin-offs that complete The Orange Box package. Portal is very much an extension and purification of the puzzly, Gravity Gun-based bits of the main game. Where the Gravity Gun simply amplifies your natural ability to pick up and throw things, the Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device used in Portal is used to create portals in walls, floors and ceilings. You can create a blue portal and an orange portal – whatever goes into one, comes out of the other. This simple, but oh so very clever, principle forms the basis of the entire game. Your task on each level is to get out and move on to the next one, but there are locked doors, energy orbs, sentry guns, water hazards and, worst of all, reinforced walls that you can’t open portals in, all set up to make it tricky, but not impossible, for you to progress. In many ways it’s a very traditional puzzle game – a linear series of increasingly complex problems with essentially only one way of solving each – but in other ways it’s like nothing you’ve ever played before. Despite being very sparse and clinical it absolutely brims with character, and every single puzzle manages to throw up a new twist on the formula, complete with immensely satisfying ‘Aha!’ moments as you gradually figure everything out. The only downside: it’s over very quickly.

Finally, Team Fortress 2. Quite simply, it’s the best game of its kind ever made, but that’s a very narrow, specific kind, and therefore might not suit everyone. If you can get a group of mates together to play regularly then you’ll get an enormous amount of enjoyment from it, but it’s nowhere near as well suited to just jumping online for a quick session with strangers now and again. If you don’t know exactly what you’re doing and don’t play as a proper team then it just doesn’t work. It’s very hardcore, but not because it’s particularly complicated – the specialised roles of each class make the actual gameplay itself very simple – but because getting the most out of it requires relatively high levels of organisation and commitment.

But even if Team Fortress proves too much effort, you’re still left with four excellent singleplayer games worth well over the £50 asking price. Basically, there is no catch. It’s true that in a few small ways it could have been better and we’d like to have seen updated versions of Half-Life 2 and Episode One rather than straight ports, but this is still by far the best value compilation in videogame history. Even Oblivion starts to look like a bit of a short-lived investment by comparison.

Gavin Mackenzie