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By all rights, Breakdown for the XBox -- at the least the 90 minutes I've played of it so far -- should be dismissed as a blatant Half-Life ripoff and sneeringly relegated to some purgatory for where unoriginal discs go to spin. I mean, you start out down in the lab -- you know, the one they're waiting for Gordon in? And the whole game takes place rigorously from a first person perspective, with no stops between levels or cutscenes. There's a female character who seems suspiciously similar to the one we've seen in the Half-Life 2 screenshots. And you're being chased down by -- wait for it -- military commandoes AND strange alien invaders from who knows where. They even threw in the old amnesia gambit, for heaven's sake! And the soldiers aren't anywhere near as clever or scary as those old HL grunts.
But.
But.
Then there's the part where it's a first person PUNCHER. And the part where the production values are top notch, both visually and auditory. And the part where when you get beat up the world goes fuzzy and red. And the part where you have a hallucination about an hour in that all of the sudden you're out in the desert and it totally feels believable. And the part where it's a hell of a lot of (granted, hard) FUN.
So yeah, it's a Half-Life ripoff, or if you prefer, homage. But what better game to borrow from? Especially since we're probably a good half year from the honest-to-Administrator sequel. I give it two fists of fury up. 10:24:46 PM () 
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