()()()--+++ THE PROS OF HALF-LIFE 2 +++--()()()

-------------------------------------------------------world/lore building and subtlety:
The world of Half-Life 2 is indeed presented well, and a first time player gets to enjoy sucking in as many details as they can about the world as they play. While there are few moments of environmental storytelling, the ones that are there are exceptional, specifically radio dialogue, the ocean being drained, and Nova Prospekt revealing stalkers and stripped soldiers. Radio dialogue is unbelievably detailed thanks to Marc Laidlaw for something a vast majority players either won't recognize or won't understand, both the words themselves and what they mean.

I'll give an example here with regards to subtlety:
Water cans are quite subtle, but have you ever seen water in a fuckin' can? Because I haven't, it feels foreign and weird. There are occasional minor things like this that are backwards but you don't think much of until you go "hey, that's kinda strange".

Both of these are examples of the game providing very minor uncanny valley, intentional by the developers or not it still works well.

A final subjective example is the stripped soldier. When I first saw the stripped soldier, I didn't think much of him. I'm essentially the whitest dude in existence so I didn't think his skin tone was really off or anything until I started looking into the details of his model, my skin also has weird purple marks all about it like the soldier does due to our lack of pigmentation. Difference is, his is unnatural when you start to look into it which didn't truly click for me upon first viewing him. His model isn't just a generic superhuman cyborg, its modifications are subtle and almost existing in reality because he's still human for the most part, just artificially maintained. No ridiculous "durr super-strength super-speed supersoldier", their modifications appear to mostly be so their parts are replaceable and they are maintained by the Combine instead of enhancing their combat skills.

https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/950713639429781785/3E81670253D4491C7142F40ECA49BD0C29BD98B4/
https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/950713639429782273/EAF73429AAFEBAE2315FB8C0AADF6C626B3F34A1/

-------------------------------------------------------a good setting with many stories never told:
The game leaves much of the world to be imagined in the head of the player, like a novel, which is more powerful than anything that could be portrayed on screen. What happened to the average person after Black Mesa? What ways have xen infestations affected Earth and its animal populations? Infinite stories can be told in this universe at any point between resonance cascade and after the events of the theoretical final HL game, this does dual as a negative however as I go into further detail in the cons section.

-------------------------------------------------------tasteful writing:
Characters rarely curse which is often used as a substitute to fix bad writing and to make the game 'intense' and/or 'hardcore' to 12 year olds, see Gears of War and Payday 2 for two examples of both in action. 'Fuck' is also never heard by the player which is often used by shitty cliche writers to make a scene more intense. This extends to all Valve games, which is nice.

-------------------------------------------------------voice acting and voice directing:
Voice acting was exceptional for a game from 2004 both in main cast and additionals, and aged very well. 98% of lines were well delivered by actors aside from ones that themselves were poorly written, i.e. "HOW DARE YOU EVEN MENTION HER DOCTOR BREEN?!?!"

-------------------------------------------------------sound design:
Sound design is also exceptional, nearly all sounds are very realistic including gunfire, distant gunfire, the doppler effect, explosions, etc. Some sounds are stylized as well for gameplay purposes, such as squishy/fleshy zombie impact sounds. All Combine-related sounds are extremely atmospheric, immersive, and foreign sounding and are at least 50% responsible for the atmosphere HL2 emits, in Combine-controlled areas at least.

Music is also exceptional, specifically ambient music which is some of my personal favorite in any form of media.

-------------------------------------------------------graphical fidelity:
The game has no visible post-processing like many games from the time. The game doesn't look like plastic/clay like Halo/Doom 3 did but this one is tricky because the HDR update removed everything being extremely shiny, before that things were overly shiny which looked awful. Overall, the character models looked exceptional for the time for the most part, especially the faces due to them using real reference models. The worst models are the zombies though, they have many low quality textures and other issues about them, likely because they were finished late.

The environments vary, but they often look bad with low res textures and blocky design. Many props (water cans, chairs, etc.) have high-res textures though, which is impressive.

-------------------------------------------------------enemy animation:
The enemy animations for CPs, soldiers, and zombies are exceptional for the time period, especially without using motion capture. They don't look janky like many other games from the era, they hold up pretty well overall. Of poor note is the reload animations for soldiers, which are completely incorrect for all guns and basically have the soldiers moving their arms around the air for no reason.

-------------------------------------------------------facial animation:
Facial animation is extremely advanced, more so than nearly anything on the market to date. It would be immersive if the characters and writing were any good, see cons.

-------------------------------------------------------physics:
Even to this date, physics are still cool and interesting to fuck around with. Countless people have undoubtedly fucked around in GMod with the physics engine, and the interactivity with the environment is great, even if it serves little purpose in gameplay despite Valve far-overusing physics in HL2.



()()()--+++ WHY HALF-LIFE 2 SUCKS DONKEY DICK +++--()()()

-------------------------------------------------------not enough backstory:
After the trilogy ended, we don't know enough about the world or how it functioned, there is practically no backstory given to the player and it's so bad that players have to email the fucking writer and inspect every pixel of every texture and every audio file for maximum info. 		I consider this to be abhorrent, the cult of HL2 acts like this is a positive because of the positives of environmental storytelling and it leaves speculation to players, but it ended up being a negative in hindsight simply due to the lack of knowledge players actually have about this universe.

"What purpose do the Combine serve? Do they have societies? Who performed the surgery on the stripped soldier? Are there non-combative human Combine units like stalkers? Who maintains everything, surely stalkers are too stupid to do technical work? They enslave everything for mostly use in combat, but for what purpose? Are the Combine anything besides an assortment of various enemies for the player to kill? How did citizens live under C17 rule? Was it communist? Was there currency? Were citizens slaves? Did they work in factories? What did they produce? How did the Combine invade? How did Breen surrender Earth? How did he communicate with them? What was the Seven-Hour War like? What is Dark Energy? What does the Combine use it for aside from weaponry and the Citadel? What do Combine Elites look like? What ranks are there within the OTA? How do citizens still live in the coast and have bases without getting assraped by a multi-universal power? How do advisors even communicate? Why are fast zombies and poison zombies not capable of speaking like the classic variant? Where did fast headcrabs and poison headcrabs come from? Where the fuck are bullsquids, houndeyes, gargantuas, gonarchs, alien grunts?  How the actual fuck did Kleiner and Eli get equipment and their clothes from Black Mesa across the Atlantic ocean into C17? WHAT THE FUCK HAPPENED IN THE LAST 20 YEARS, CAN SOMEBODY PLEASE TELL ME BEFORE YOU SEND ME OFF TO PERFORM ANOTHER TASK I FUCKING BEG YOU?"

Nope, guess not, now the trilogy is over and we'll never know shit about the universe at hand because Valve decided to be so vague about everything, but it doesn't even matter anyway because everything is subject to being changed at a whim, see below.

-------------------------------------------------------literally everything is retconned
Guess what? HL2 has retcons. As a matter of fact, major story elements from HL1 were retconned.

Barney, Eli, Kleiner, Alyx, Mossman, and any other forgettable one-dimensional asshole I'm forgetting didn't exist. Ask them to place down what generic NPC was supposedly this character in HL1 and they will come up with some arbitrary even it it can be defused by argument, i.e. Barney from BS cannot be HL2 Barney because he never met gordon, not to mention BS isn't even confirmed as canon.
Ask two different people what character was what in HL1, and they'll probably give you different answers and act like you're an idiot if you don't believe them.

Breen is probably the worst retcon. The G-Man was OUTRIGHT STATED BY THE AUDIO SCRIPT IN HALF-LIFE TO BE THE ADMINISTRATOR, yet Alyx says "HUE HUE GORDON REMEMBER YOUR OLD ADMINISTRATOR AT BLACK MESA?!?!? YEAH THAT'S HIM NOW GORDON." The entire plot of HL1 rested on G-Man intentionally causing the cascade then using you afterwards as an agent after watching you, Breen's existence creates many plotholes because it would mean he intentionally caused the cascade like G-Man did since he's filling G-Man's role from the previous game, yet Breen is simultaneously depicted as varyingly sympathetic to the human race and gives a genuine speech to Overwatch saying humanity will be fucked if they don't get their shit together. Furthermore, the game expects you to feel hatred for Breen but it never clicks, you have no investment in hating him because the only other ones who hate him are shitty retcons and non-characters such as citizens.
Even GORDON HIMSELF was retconned. Alyx states he "raced Barney through vents to Kleiner's office" in EP1 which is simply retarded, and he had a ginger ponytail in HL1 while now he has brown hair for some reason.
Hue-hue, remember Magnusson? Yeah, he's the one whose breakfast you destroyed in HL1 despite the fact that he would be dead as Gordon went the only way out and he could not follow Gordon without an HEV suit for multiple reasons. Such retcons do nothing but create plotholes that cannot be solved, explained, or justified.

Here's the thing: In early HL2 stages, characters had no relations to Black Mesa at all. It was only after they cut all the HL1 aliens and weapons they realized "What the fuck, our game has no relation to HL1 at all" and so they added in the shitty characters we all want to strangle today.

This brings me to my final point: Why should I care about the universe of Half-Life when many major and minor plot elements from the previous game are nullified, shitty non-characters are railroaded in and the game pretends they existed all along, and the lead writer himself stated that Valve changes anything at any time for any reason? The answer is I don't, I lose all investment in the universe because these elements keep me from ever being truly immersed.

-------------------------------------------------------poorly written characters:
The characters in HL2 have no personality whatsoever. They are completely one-dimensional and have no character traits of any kind, with Barney perhaps being the only exception and Kleiner to a lesser extent. Eli and Alyx are complete non-characters and would be what you see when you look up "one-dimensional" in the dictionary. Allow me to elaborate below:

-Let's see what the wiki states the character traits are for Alyx and Eli:

"Alyx is a skilled hacker: she is able to operate and manipulate Combine-based objects such as turrets with the help of her gear, and also wields an EMP Tool used to perform a variety of tasks.
She also "put together" the Shorepoint Scout Car with her father Eli, and helped Kleiner "resurrect" his teleport.
She is also very proficient with a pistol and in unarmed combat, single-handedly defeating the five Metrocops who almost catch Gordon during his escape at the start of Half-Life 2, and helps fight alongside Gordon briefly during the chapters Entanglement and Anticitizen One in Half-Life 2. In Episode One, Alyx accompanies Gordon for most of the game and demonstrates fighting skills previously unseen, using a shotgun and kicking and kneeing off Zombies when they get too close."

These aren't fucking character traits and have nothing to do with her personality.

"Despite Alyx's friendly nature, she shows some hostility towards Dr. Mossman because of Mossman's somewhat patronizing attitude towards her, as well as Mossman's interest in her father. At the end of Half-Life 2, this hostility has seemingly vanished, when Dr. Mossman helps to free Alyx and her father from the clutches of Dr. Breen.
Alyx is also a rather cheerful person, showing some sense of humor, evidenced by the jokes she makes about various events. For instance, she playfully mocks Gordon's silence at the start of Half-Life 2, telling him "Man of few words, aren't you?". Another example can be experienced in the chapter Lowlife of Episode One, where she and Gordon navigate a series of Zombie-infested tunnels. During lulls in combat she imitates a Zombie growl to scare the player, then will laugh and say "Gotcha!" when they find out it is her. She also attempts another "joke" shortly after when entering a Combine troop train. She spots a dead Overwatch Soldier with a Headcrab over its head and tries to lighten the situation, naming it a "Zombine".
Alyx is also a very sensitive person, giving some heart and realism to the series. She does not believe her eyes when she sees the state of the Citadel inside, is affected by the Stalkers' fate and behavior at the start of the Episode One chapter Lowlife, and cries over the loss of her father at the end of Episode Two."

Okay, so her personality according to the wiki is "she's a hacker, she fixed the car, she helped kleiner fix his teleport, she is proficient with handguns, she's friendly and cheerful, and she shows emotion." That's not a personality, that's trash. Furthermore, her showing contrived """emotion""" is literally just so that Valve can showcase their facial animation updates in EP1 and EP2.

Furthermore, Alyx is a goddamn Mary Sue that ruins immersion nearly every time she's on screen. Not only is she just some random bitch wearing a casual out-of-place outfit that can defeat EIGHT FUCKING TRANSHUMAN SOLDIERS ARMED WITH DARK ENERGY WEAPONRY AND BALLISTIC PLATING BY HERSELF because she's just such a badass and a strong & realistic woman according to reddit, BUT she also supposedly invents and fixes everything such as DOG, Kleiner's teleport, the scout car, and other shit. How the fuck does DOG even exist? He shouldn't, there's no way he was created by her, I'd even have a hard time believing the scientists created him. If this random mutt whore can create a two meter high robot that is nearly incapable of dying and can kill fucking striders by itself, why haven't the resistance created an army of these? It's like Megaton in Fallout 3, its existence is extremely improbable and it ruins immersion.

-Let's check Eli's personality as described by the wiki.

"Eli is warm, good-humored, and charismatic, holding everyone around him in the aura of his personal charm.[3] A skilled scientist, he designed the Gravity Gun and Dog, "put together" the Shorepoint Scout Car with his daughter (and added himself the Tau Cannon to it), and was able to rebuild a teleport with the aid of the other key Resistance members."

Okay, so Eli has a sense of humor and is charismatic. How fucking cliche and one-dimensional is this? Very. There is no way to sum up his character, try to do it yourself in your head with your memory from the Half-Life franchise. Good fucking luck.
Oh, and Mossman is also so forgettable I forgot to mention her prior. She also lacks character traits, there is no way to describe her aside from "traitor who sides with humanity again". She serves the sole purpose of Valve wanting a female scientist that betrayed you in HL1, and nothing more.
The same shit I said above applies to Breen as well. Kleiner almost has a personality, with him being a fucking nerd, but his quirks and the like are never elaborated upon enough.

I cannot iterate this enough however, these character personalities are BETHESDA-TIER.

There are far too many references to Black Mesa and the events of HL1, they are constant in place of actual dialogue and good writing. They ruin immersion by breaking the forth wall and are GRATING past the first playthrough.
The dialogue between characters in Nova Prospekt and the Citadel is some of the most cliche and forgettable shit I've seen. Everything Alyx spews to the antagonists is just trash, much like the "character" itself.
Breen's speeches are quite cliche. People think they're well-written because they use big words but they're what you've in all other forms of media before and are truly nothing special outside of giving some lore details.

There's never any real conflict between characters, which Valve attempted to correct with Magnusson in EP2 who himself serves no purpose other than to create conflict, making him also one-dimensional. Everyone just kisses Gordon's ass for accomplishing nothing truly difficult to the player, this is by far the most grating thing about the writing itself in the HL2 saga. Funny enough, this was opposite in early stages, as citizens mostly did not know who Gordon was and in fact told him to fuck off because the attention he's bringing from the cops will get them killed, which would have been amazing for giving off a cold atmosphere that not even your allies are truly allies. Every ally in HL2 exists to serve Gordon, either physically or by stroking his ego. The latter is a horrible existence for them, and quite the annoyance for me.

-------------------------------------------------------it doesn't feel like half-life

HL has always been about surviving against an overbearing alien threat as a lone survivor, secluded from everyone else. HL2's shitty rebellion story is a disgrace to the brilliance the first game provided with its setting, and also a misuse of the potential HL2's setting provided.

In my opinion, the story should have been about not defeating the Combine in a rebellion in a generic dystopian "one-man army defeats enemy army" story but exploring how the events of HL1 affected the world. In the beginning letters and Eli slideshows Marc wrote, this seems to have been the original direction for HL2 but it was lost along the way to the final product.
https://imgur.com/a/3nrQyZP
https://imgur.com/a/Q4NznXl

The loss of aliens and weapons from HL1 not only kills the feeling that this is a Half-Life game, but it fails to show the alien infestation of Earth properly. You mean to tell me the only aliens humanity faces now are barnacles, headcrabs, zombies, and antlions? That's not what HL1 told me and it's not what HL1 set up. As stated earlier, Valve realized the game had no relations to HL1 so they added in retcon characters that coincidentally ALL worked at Black Mesa, even including the fucking antagonist.
The retcon characters not only get in the way of immersion, but the story. They are extremely intrusive, an aggressive assault to keep the player from ever being immersed because their mere existence constantly breaks fhe forth wall. The story is truly best when no characters are around to ruin it, as the game leaves Gordon to get details about the world through occasional exploration.


-------------------------------------------------------unskippable cutscenes:
Every playthrough, you are forced to sit through what feels like hours of shitty dialogue and doing nothing. These are beyond a slog, they downright ruin the game and keep people from wanting to replay it. How many people quit before getting the crowbar? At least 2%, I'd bet.

-------------------------------------------------------sound design:
Remember how I said the sound design was good? Guess fucking what? Essentially every single sound used in HL2 is a stock sound taken out of a library, sometimes modified a bit. You can easily recognize sounds in various TV shows, movies, games etc. People on /r/halflife think they stole it from Half-Life 2, but they're really just stock sound effects. Valve is really fucking lazy.

Furthermore, some sound effects have quality that both rival that of HL1 and are actually identical to HL1. Headcrabs use the same sounds as HL1 thus making their quality atrocious, for example. When I first heard the HL1 gib sound in EP2 when the advisor tongues the skull of the dead rebel, I audibly laughed out loud.

A new sound effect, the zombie moan, is thought by many to be "muffled" by the headcrab, but the sound files are really just exceptionally low quality because they were recorded with a shitty mic by Marc Laidlaw while reportedly goofing around, then they decided to keep it in for some reason despite sounding worse than some sounds in HL1. It actually has a bitrate of 88 KB. http://combineoverwiki.net/wiki/References:Marc_Laidlaw_emails#On_his_level_design_work

Furthermore, at least half the soundtrack is straight up ripped from HL1.

-------------------------------------------------------gameplay:
The most extensive section, and truly why the game is awful.

See, many people say "oh, hl2 was so close to hl1, it has the classic fps style!" - yes, and no. It doesn't have regenerating health, but gameplay was significantly dumbed down.

-----------------ENEMIES

HL2 has far worse enemies than HL1, including the ones kept.
Zombies are the only equal, as they are as harmless as they were in the first game as they are too slow to be of any threat. However, this doesn't excuse them being harmless in HL2 nor does it excuse the fast zombie and the poison zombie being shit. Fast zombies do FIVE DAMAGE PER SWIPE ON HARD DIFFICULTY and stop between every two swipes for a second, and poison zombies are NEVER used in a scenario where you can be ambushed by other zombies as to let the poison headcrabs finish you off. Headcrabs are harmless still, fast headcrabs are faster headcrabs (really creative guys), and poison headcrabs like I just stated never ambush the player properly outside of the hospital in EP1.

Combine soldiers are slower, less dangerous, and often dumber than their HECU counterparts which is embarrassing for a game released six years later, much like all of the cons of Half-Life 2. While in HL1 focus was on the individual soldier, the soldiers in HL2 are too weak for an individual soldier to be of any threat. They often die by their own grenades, damage friendlies, and only two soldiers can attack you at a time which makes them pitifully weak. There's a reason why in HL1 you generally fight 4-6 marines at a time meanwhile in HL2 you fight 6-12 soldiers at a time.
This doesn't even go into the fact that soldiers do only two things 99% of the time: stand out in the open and shoot you while standing still, or rush you like they're braindead so they get shot down immediately. The two soldier attack limit often prevents them from flanking because the other soldiers are designated for providing covering fire once one of the two soldiers has to reload, this of course never works out because they die before that happens due to how weak and immobile the soldiers are.
The reason why HECU were so much of a threat was for two reasons: the damage they output, and more importantly their mobility. They were EXTREMELY mobile which could cause a player who's unskilled or not playing attention to get overwhelmed very easily, they often encouraged strategy to kill with all of the tools at your disposal such as tripmines and different weapons for different situations, i.e. pistol for maximum range, smg for generla combat, and shotgun for finishing them off.
Soldiers in HL2 lack the strategic depth of being defeated in numerous ways due to the drop in the amount of weapons available to the player, and they also deal less damage because Valve has to use them much more often than HECU in higher numbers due to the fact that so many other enemies were dropped from HL1 and replaced by absolutely nothing.

Antlions are actually good enemies because their attacks can be dodged both in the air and on the ground, they are truly the only good enemy in HL2 even if they are so visually dull I forgot the game had them for about a decade.

Enemy variety is far down from HL1. HL2 consists of humans with guns, humans with claws, and antlions. ALL INTERESTING ENEMIES ARE SHITTY BULLETSPONGE RPG BOSSES. Unlike in HL1, there are no aliens that require the player to adapt to their attacks, such as the bullsquid and vortigaunt. Here's how HL2 and HL1 enemies go discounting bosses:

--HL1:
-headcrab (harmless)
-zombie (harmless)
-bullsquid (requires player to continually dodge projectile until it's killed, an element of interactivity that requires the player to do something to not die unlike all hl1 enemies)
-vortigaunt (extremely damaging lightning attack that can take out ~40 HP in one hit, forcing the player to move their ASS to cover or take massive damage)
-HECU soldier (not only did they deal a shitload of immediate hitscan damage unlike other enemies, but they were EXTREMELY mobile as listed above which could cause a player who's unskilled or not playing attention to get overwhelmed very easily, they often encouraged strategy to kill with all of the tools at your disposal such as tripmines)
-houndeye (worked in packs and required the player to run the hell away or they would take considerable damage over time)
-assassin (extraordinarily mobile enemy reminiscent of multiplayer that played a game of cat and mouse with the player, always a fun fight)
-alien grunt (unique in that it's actually wearing armor that affects the players damage output, you must attack its weak spot unlike all other enemies and simultaneously dodge its homing hives)
-alien controller (also unique in that it's capable of flying and considerably mobile, encouraging medium-ranged weapon use on top of having to dodge its projectiles which can make fights tricky)

--HL2:
-headcrab (harmless)
-fast headcrab (faster yet still harmless)
-poison headcrab (harmless as it's never used correctly)
-zombie (walks at 1/4 mph, harmless, impossible to be hit by it unless afk - countered by holding s while this enemy should have improved from hl1, not gotten worse much like all other HL2 aspects)
-fast zombie (5 damage per swipe with a pause after two swipes, harmless for this reason - countered by hitting 4 then pressing mouse2)
-poison zombie (slower than regular zombie as if that was even physically possible and once again never used in conjuction with other enemy types to finish the player off, thus it's never a genuine threat)
-metrocop (weaker soldier with some of the worst ai in gaming, literally stands there and waits for gordon the god to shoot him in the face and that's all he ever does)
-soldier (inferior HECU unit that's overused due to a lack of other enemies, dull ai that has them standing still shooting you or rushing you blindly, flanks you maybe 1 out of every 10 fights)
-antlion (the best enemy here, requires interactivity from the player to defeat)

While at first it seems the amount of enemies are the same, in reality the enemies of HL2 are mostly different archetypes of an already existing enemy that more importantly DO NOT PROVIDE MECHANICS AS DEEP AS HL1, RESULTING IN THE BENEFITS OF ENEMY VARIETY BEING NON-EXISTENT. In HL1, each interesting alien presented a new and/or different style of gameplay as I listed above, each requires some level of strategy to take down. Changing gameplay is required in HL1, the most strategy the enemy variety of HL2 provides is "hold s to get away from zombie", "wait for poison headcrabs to be thrown then hit with crowbar" and "hold mouse1 to shoot down cannon fodder soldier standing still waiting to die".

This drop in enemy variety is made worse by less mobile enemies (even the ones kept are less mobile, specifically soldiers) which helps the fact that HL2 features much less strategic enemies. This makes fighting enemies less interactive which is bad because HL2 has essentially the same gunplay as HL1: spongey enemies and guns that have no recoil. The combat in HL1 was satisfying because you had to use skill and strategy to kill anything ranging from a bullsquid to a vortigaunt to a HECU unit, all of them required you to adapt to them to take minimal damage.
Your skill at adapting and dodging what enemies throw at you in HL1 is what made the combat good. HL2 lacks this element completely due to less mobile enemies and lower enemy variety, and as such is left with shitty gunplay, noninteractive enemies, and a small and dull selection of weapons which I will get to momentarily.

And since this is supposedly a Half-Life title, I must ask you: WHERE ARE ALL OF THE HIGHLY INTERESTING ALIENS? Nowhere to be found, and to boot the ones from HL1 were eliminated because Valve was too fucking lazy to implement them correctly which they admitted in RTB in regards to the bullsquid and houndeye. That's Valve's motto: if something is too difficult to create, just drop it entirely even if it fucks with the story and even if it was a really good idea.

Here's the thing though: had Valve kept bullsquids, houndeyes, and assassins with similar mechanics from HL1 while simultaneously upgrading soldiers and improving zombies to be actual threats, I would not complain nearly as much because even though there would be less enemies, there would still be enemies with deep mechanics like HL1 even if they are the same enemies from HL1 essentially. Unfortunately, not only are there less enemies in HL2 but they are not mechanically deep at all, they require no strategy to take down aside from antlions and they are not visually interesting in my opinion.



And of final and extremely important note: bullet sponges. HL1 also had this issue but it was lessened due to the interactivity when fighting enemies, you didn't exactly just stand still shooting a massive HP bar, because if you did you would die.

The issue is the HP differences between normal and hard.

Normal mode is so easy even someone who's never played vidya before could have minimal trouble with the gameplay, and hard mode is bulletspongey to the point of making gameplay feel sluggish which cannot be redeemed due to the lack of strategy enemies require.
This would be easily fixed by making enemies on hard have normal HP values but do 3x damage. They don't die in one shot like Rainbow Six, but they're not absurd

-----------------WEAPONS

Oh boy, the weapons. I'm having a hard time figuring out where to start.

For starters, the weapons are horrifically balanced in comparison to HL1. Early-ish in the game weapons serve as progression, once you get the shotgun the pistol and SMG are useless, and once you get the AR2 there is almost no justifable reason to use the pistol or SMG again.
This is in stark contrast to HL1 where every single weapon could be used throughout the entire game, they all had their roles which I will list below in comparison to the roles they serve in HL2.

The pistol is too inaccurate when it should be the most accurate to make up for its low damage output, and the SMG is just straight up ass with low damage and accuracy.. The SMG is so bad that you never touch it after getting the AR2 aside from perhaps using its grenades. Even the AR2 feels weak as fuck.
Only the magnum, shotgun, and revolver are any level of satisfying to use. Fucking mindblowing retards use this incredibly poor balance as justification for why gunplay is """good""", because "DUDE BRO THE MAGNUM AND SHOTGUN ARE SO GOOD BRO", yet it's quite the opposite. Having so many weapons be so shitty and having the only non-shitty weapons be extremely limited in ammo to the point they won't last a single firefight makes for really shitty gunplay, and in an FPS this means it makes for a really shitty game.

That is one of the biggest issues aside from guns feeling like shit, this also attributes to poor balance: ammo capacity. Any weapon that isn't basically a nerf gun is extremely limited in ammo to the point of not lasting more than a single firefight, or in the case of the shotgun using half of your reserves from maximum in a single firefight. My use of grenades is too limited, my use of the magnum is too limited, my use of the crossbow is too limited, my use of the AR2 is too limited, all the time throughout HL2 there's ammo you cannot pick up because you're at max because you never get the chance to use these weapons due to their absurdly low capacities compared to HL1 where you could use weapons to their fullest extent.

Here lies the next issue with the HL2 loadout: it's dull as fuck. Guns look dull, they feel dull, the entire loadout is forgettable unlike HL1. And now, might I ask HOW THE ABSOLUTE FUCK YOU ONLY HAVE A SINGLE SCI-FI WEAPON IN THIS MOTHERFUCKING SCI-FI FPS AND IT'S JUST A REALLY DULL ASSAULT RIFLE STAND-IN THAT HAS A 30 ROUND MAG AND FIRES STANDARD HITSCAN BULLETS?
I don't understand how Valve thought it was even remotely acceptable to ship with such a dull, non-sfi-fi, poorly balanced, trash arsenal. What's worse is what they had planned that would have been actually interesting and fun to use if made correctly such as flare guns, acid flamethrowers, hopwire grenades, and functionally similar weapons such as the tau cannon and S.L.A.M.
(fun fact, the tau cannon was cut very late in hl2's development because it's the one beta weapon without a final equivalent still given to the player when typing impulse 101 in the leak)

As it stands, HL2's loadout is HL1's loadout but lacking all mechanical depth in their application to the enemy and with less weapons, the most dull ones being kept but with two new guns, the AR2 which is visually dull for a sci-fi rifle and mechanically bad as well. Then we have the gravity gun which I will go more into detail about below, literally only designed to show off the physics engine.

-HL1:
-crowbar (break stuff)
-pistol (extremely accurate backup handgun that can be used on its own to snipe enemies too far out of range for other guns, also used for finishing off headcrabs)
-smg (all-rounder, mostly used for soldiers and houndeyes)
-shotgun (all-rounder for multiple aliens including vorts and alien grunts, also useful for finishing off a wounded soldier)
-magnum (same role as hl1, extremely powerful revolver that can be used for multiple purposes)
-crossbow (used for taking down ichthyosaur and enemies at range when you have ammo to spare)
-frag grenade (more useful than hl2 due to being able to hold 10, very useful for taking out the tougher soldiers hl1 offers)
-tripmines (very useful and satisfying for setting up traps for enemies)
-tau cannon (a sci-fi assault rifle with the unique and interesting mechanic of overcharging being punishing to say the least)
-hivemind (infinite ammo  organic assault rifle with homing bullets, useful for shooting around corners
-gluon gun (a.k.a. "everything needs to die RIGHT NOW" gun, a sci-fi laser beam that is quite visually interesting)
-snarks (mechanically interesting weapon that rarely has a use, but it's still awesome to be able to actually use them efficiently occasionally and they're visually interesting)

-HL2:
-crowbar (break stuff)
-pistol (too inaccurate to be of utility use via headshots, damage output too low to be used elsewhere, only used for a few seconds to finish off headcrab)
-magnum (good gun, ammo is so limited you cannot use it for more than a single firefight)
-smg (low damage, low accuracy, feels like it's spraying rubber bullets at the enemy. also so inaccurate it can't get headshots past 5 meters making it 100% shit. good for killing fast headcrabs i guess, fucking worthless anywhere else. would change to 6 dmg and 180 capacity.)
-shotgun (yeah it kills things in close quarters, too bad it lacks the depth it had in hl1 as a tool against certain enemy types much like all other weapons)
-ar2 (literally an upgraded smg, this would only be acceptable if the SMG was dropped after getting this but as it stands it nullifies a weapon in our loadout which is very poor balance. also has an extremely similar alt fire. ammo is far too limited too.)
-crossbow (a copy of the gun from the first game but with physics)
-frag grenades (they look like shit visually but they're more satisfying than HL1's nades in my opinion, the only weapon that actually improved a bit)
-gravity gun (it would be fun but, like the examined life of gaming said, it's used far too much. you're nearly required to use it in ravenholm due to deliberately low ammo placement. it has a major design flaw: if you're holding anything bigger than a barrel or a toilet, you can't even fucking see what's in front of you. this weapon would have been good if it was never forced upon the player and the devs left the player to find their own uses for it, i.e. as cover. i'm sure 99% of players only use it to break crates, it's never used in combat by people.)

So, the weapons and enemies are lacking both in number, depth, and visual interest from HL1, HL1 has 12 weapons with many being interesting and all being useful.
Meanwhile, HL2 had 9 weapons with 7 of those being identical to HL1 but worse because they're exceptionally poorly balanced and lack the depth HL1's arsenal offered.

The gameplay AND storyline disparities are both the main cause and caused by the following issue I will elaborate upon below.


-----------------IT'S A GLORIFIED TECH DEMO


It's quite clear the main focus of HL2 was developing the Source engine, this is evident by how lacking it is in all aspects compared to HL1 in exchange for physics, facial animation, and improved graphical fidelity among other obviouus clues.
Problem is, these don't add to gameplay in meaningful ways.

Starting with facial animation, something people praise HL2 for. Is it good? Yes. Does it add any value to gameplay and its mechanics? No. Would I want advanced facial animation over good gameplay which is what HL2 offers you? No.
Furthermore, body animation during cutscenes in HL2 is laughable. It's janky and provides very poor contrast to the advanced facial animation. Furthermore, characters (even citizens and metrocops) often have pauses where they stop idle before engaging in a new animation.


Onto physics. The game introduces a physics engine because Valve thought it would be cool to have the player's actions truly affect the world for maximum interactivity. While the physics engine is cool, it adds little to gameplay mechanically
(even though theoretically it can add a lot) and it has numerous issues that actually get in the way of gameplay.
A big issue in HL2 is getting stuck on random shit. The player gets stuck on milk crates, water cans, and anything else below the knees that's in the player's path. The obvious issue would be to make the player not clip with these if they interact to with his legs, but that's too complicated for Valve apparently. Next is getting stuck on geometry, which happens relatively often due to it being more complex yet geometry detection being similar to HL1. Neither should occur, and they actively inhibit gameplay.
Furthermore, physics are used to the point you wish they were never developed for HL2. Every single puzzle involves physics and these are irritating when you realize they serve no reason other than to show off the engine for the game.

By far the biggest issue with physics is Ravenholm, an entire chapter based around physics. Yeah, remember how I said zombies suck ass?
Zombies are a really shitty enemy type, because they are never a threat to the player for reasons I elaborated upon above. Classic zombies are slower than actual corpses, fast zombies only deal five damage per swipe then take a second pause, and poison zombies/headcrabs are never used in conjunction with other enemy types aside from the inside the EP1 Hospital.

Ravenholm is a boring slog, it's effectively one giant ebin cinematic set piece because there's no threat of the player dying unless they go afk and let the shitty zombies kill them or are dumb enough to die from their own traps. It is of the least challenge in the entire game, only liked for its horror elements and atmosphere as opposed to actual gameplay.
To make matters worse, ammo is arbitrarily heavily limited to encourage the player to use the gravity gun, because if they didn't then Valve wouldn't be showing off the Source engine and HL2 would be for naught wouldn't they?
By the time Ravenholm ends, you want nothing to do with the gravity gun again and indeed, if you watch any playthrough most players did not use the gravity gun 99.999% of the time outside of ravenholm.
To make matters ever worse, for nearly 1/3 of EP1 this is the only weapon you're allowed to use. Fuck you, this game is meant to showcase our engine and if you don't like it then you need to go back to CoD bro.
Also, Grigori should not exist. Why couldn't the player be alone during Ravenholm? Let me bask in the atmosphere, motherfucker.

Now, here's the thing: The physics and gravity gun in Ravenholm are a gimmick. Too bad that EVERY chapter outside of the first two has its own gimmick, the most infamous being the airboat sections:
-Water Hazard has the airboat
-Ravenholm has the gravity gun and physics (its name during development was phystown for fucks sake)
-Coast has the car, so they are reusing a gimmick from the previous chapter
-Nova Prospekt has antlions and bugbait
-Rebellion has some of the worst squad A.I. in a video game
-Citadel contains a powertrip with the gravity gun that is impossible to fail at


---Now you might be asking, why does each chapter have a gimmick unlike HL1? This is why:
IF HL2 LEFT THE PLAYER ALONE WITH THE ENEMY/WEAPON DEPTH AND VARIETY HL2 PROVIDES, IT WOULD BE EXTREMELY BORING AND BLATANTLY SHALLOW.

HL1 didn't need gimmicks because its gameplay as I have stated countless time had inherent strategy attached to it, each weapon had a role and each enemy had to be heavily adapted to win. In HL2, weapons do not have roles like they once did versus various enemy types (there aren't even enough enemy types for this to apply) and enemies are defeated with minimal interactivity. To make up for this, Valve adds a shitty gimmick each chapter to vary gameplay and annoy the piss out of the player instead of offering them a good game like HL1.





-------------------------------------------------------CONCLUSION-------------------------------------------------------

HL2 is a glorified tech demo that was inferior in every single gameplay element to its predecessor, had a generic story that throws the good setting out the window and does not live up to HL1, has shitty retcon characters that you couldn't even less of a fuck about which makes it laughable when Valve tries to make them show emotion to show off facial animation, and has enemies/weapons blatantly inferior to that of a game released six years prior when HL2 was not only supposed to innovate, but was hyped up to be essentially the best game of all time.

Dropping the shitty retcon characters, add in new ones that are related to the resistance with ONE scientist from black mesa who works on tech for the resistance and holds a leadership position but had never interacted with Gordon ever, keeping aliens from HL1,  keeping Tau Cannon and tripmines, adding new interesting non-hitscan weapons, giving the player much more exposition one way or another, and having Gordon mostly be on his own throughout the game to explore the universe post-HL1 would have leaded to a much superior story and game overall.
As it stands, HL2 is a serious downgrade from the first which is not acceptable in my eyes, maybe I'm just picky but I expect the sequel to a game released six years later to not only be as good, but even better. Strange, I know.

Nova Prospekt is also my favorite chapter because of the gameplay: despite gameplay being inferior to HL1, Nova Prospekt generally leaves the player to their own devices: antlion play is optional, you are prior to meeting Alyx just left to fight alone and secluded from everyone else against the soldiers of Nova Prospekt. That's what Half-Life is about: being alone against a threat much larger than you. On top of this, there's nobody around to kill my immersion, aside from Breen though his speech is nice due to the lore details and implications it gives so I let it slide.

God damn, I've said what's needed to be said for years, but yet I still don't feel I've covered everything. Perhaps others will say the rest for me.
In the end, the HL2 fanbase will die out, hopefully many more will leave 2007 and realize HL2 is not a gift from God himself. HL3 will never be made, and that's okay because it would just be a glorified tech demo like the entire HL2 saga was and probably dumb down thegameplay/story even further.

And, my god, is the fanbase retarded. I would immediately be put off as an outsider to the series by default, but this is insanity. Anything less than calling HL2 GOAT will have you bombarded with non-arguments and logical fallacies galore by dumbshits stuck in the last decade.
'go back to cod you can't understand hl2's complex gameplay it makes you THINK bro, and the SET PIECES and PHYSICS bro.'
Bitch, I was playing Half-Life before you were conceived, you're just some retard who likes HL2 because everybody else does and are completely blind to its many major faults, that, contrary to popular belief, were felt in 2004 by many as archives of forums from the time will tell you.

---A quote from Gabe Newell from 'Raising the Bar' prior to releasing Half-Life 2:
"As I write this, I have the world’s worst case of stage fright. After six years and tens of millions of dollars, after break-ins and lawsuits, after marriages and children and divorces and deaths, we’re about to ship Half-Life 2. You, the reader, know how the launch of Half-Life 2 went. You have read the reviews, seen the sales figures, heard about awards (or the lack thereof), and best of all, you’ve played the finished game.
We’ve done none of these. Did we create a worthy successor to Half-Life? Did we live up to gamer’s expectations? Did we 'pull it off'? You know, and I don’t, and that seems terribly unfair to me right now."


It was not a worthy successor in any form to me. Critics may rated it highly, the cult may blindly defend it to this day, but the true fans who played HL1 first and enjoyed it for its gameplay and universe were inevitably left disappointed with what Half-Life 2 offers and critique it because they loved the franchise.
It did not live up to the hype, and you're a fucking asshole for eternity starting from 2003 for blatantly lying about the Half-Life 2 tech demo at E3 not being scripted to high hell. None of the shit you showed was dynamic, and some of it wasn't even featured in the final game at all such as being able to barricade a door and have it get busted open by soldiers. Not to mention you have the gall to bitch about the game being leaked and act like YOU are the victim after outright lying to fans and the press alike, give me a break you fat fuck.



()()()--+++ HALF-LIFE 2: AFTERMATH +++--()()()
"If you don't like Alyx, you're probably not going to enjoy Episode one very much." - Valve developer commentary

----------------NOTES TO ADD: immersive sounds and environments from citadel in and the potential of the environments from the underground, they could have been atmospheric and creepy as fuck without alyx

Consider this a small epilogue - EP1 and to a lesser extent EP2 were completely wasted potential.

EP1 had immense potential to be good, nearly free of faults that HL2 itself didn't already have. This is my idea:

-After the explosion at the Citadel, the vorts free you from stasis. However, Alyx is nowhere to be seen, and Gordon is teleported to where EP1 starts. Dog has been searching for him for days, and carries a monitor with him so characters can communicate with anyone they find to tell them to evacuate immediately. Thing is, everybody's evacuated already: There's no way Gordon is going to leave the city before it explodes. But, it dawns upon the science team: He can delay the explosion by entering the Citadel's core and doing some shit with energy balls.
Dog gets Gordon into the red van, the science team says good luck, and Gordon is left in the Citadel alone and is, beyond this point, by himself.

-No citizens in the city, nothing good is present. Just you, soldiers, and Xen aliens infesting the city, with all of them trying to gain control.

-Now you might be asking, why should Gordon be alone? It's not just because Alyx is shit (although that's obviously a part of it), but because of the POTENTIAL ATMOSPHERE these environments give off. The sound design in the collapsing Citadel is fucking scary, the C17underground would have been what Ravenholm should have been. Give the Citadel ambient audio a listen with gcfscape and let pictures fill your mind, pretty great if you ask me. Too bad it's ruined by the Mary Sue whore known as Alyx Vance.

-These locations have so much potential to not only be atmospheric, but a callback to HL1 where Gordon is alone against multiple overbearing threats and must survive against all odds. Nobody is going to save him or even help him, it's up to himself to get his ass out of this situation. Get it now? This would have been 100x better than letting EP1 be ruined by Alyx, who sucks any fear and atmosphere out of the entire game, it's impossible to be afraid while accompanied by an immersion-breaking bitch.

Episode Two would have been better had they dropped Alyx and introduced new rebel characters that are not one-dimensional shitheads. They should still be sparse to give a desolate feeling, but present at points. Perhaps one more character aside from Griggs/Sheckley.


That's all for my thoughts on the Half-Life 2 saga, for now.