Valve Software’s recently launched Orange Box has topped both BioShock and Halo 3 in terms of favorable reviews.

Metacritic, the site that tracks the scores each game gets from multiple prominent gaming sites, has an overall rating of 98 for the Orange Box (at least while I’m writing these lines), better than BioShock’s 96 and Halo 3’s 94.

Valve’s offering includes Team Fortress 2, Half Life Episode 1 and 2 and Portal, a brand new franchise from the creators of Half Life, and the original Half Life 2, converted specially for the Xbox 360.

Players are invited again to take the role of the silent world-savior Gordon Freeman in his quest to…well… save the world from the alien invasion. Escaping from City 17 was just the beginning of new adventures in the company of sexy Alix Vance, but now the couple has to face more serious threats and new enemies.

Landscapes have changed, objects now behave more naturally when moved or destroyed, the AI has improved and can now coordinate its actions in order to better anticipate or respond to your actions and generally speaking the graphics looks a whole lot better.

Speaking of graphics, Valve did a tremendous job at remastering the “old” content from Half Life 2, which at its arrival in October 2004 was already a masterpiece in this domain, but which now looks better (even on consoles) with the addition of newer technologies like soft shadows, HDR (high dynamic range) or raytracing.