YMMV / Hunt Down the Freeman

#-O

• Accidental Innuendo: Adam's grunting when Mitch shoots him multiple times sounds more like he's getting off on it than being in pain.
• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • The G-Man paraphrasing Mitchell's "Facing the Bullets" One-Liner from the prologue. Was he really pointing out Michell's determination or was he simply half-mocking him?
  • We'll most likely never learn the true reason Adam made a deal with the G-Man in the first place. Did he do it because he wanted power among other survivors of the Seven Hour War? Or was he told of the overall effect of the G-Man's grandiose plan and felt that he had no choice but to cooperate?
  • The fact that the final defence sequence is considerably easier than other Hold the Line segments (barring the 15-minute timer) mostly due to turrets, ammo and being easier to defend might hint that the G-Man saw some more potential for Mitchell when the latter asked what would happen if he got out alive and provided him with some backup.
  • Speaking of the G-Man, his reaction after Mitchell asks the aforementioned question. He turns around and smiles at him in response. Was the G-Man really intrigued by Mitchell's determination, or did he smile out of disbelief that the man who was forced to waste two decades of his life would want more?
  • Mitchell killing Adam instead of listening to his explanations. Was he really so obsessed with revenge that he put any common sense away in favor of finally delivering payback at Adam? Or, alternatively, did Mitchell think that Adam wouldn't tell him anything new and/or try and lie his way out of the situation?
• Angst? What Angst?:
  • When Boris meets Mitchell after the second Time Skip, he greets him like an old friend, despite the fact that Mitchell ruined his life back in New Alaska by destroying the Combine Cremator facility.
  • When Sasha dies in front of Mitchell, he does not really seem to react to it, nor to Adam's sudden presence in the rebel hideout. The most we get is Mitchell's shocked face, but he shrugs it off pretty quickly.
  • Nor does Mitchell really care about how many innocent people he and his group have murdered during their wild goose chase. He also forgets about his HECU squadmates pretty fast and never brings them up, not even his own brother Adrian.
• Arc Fatigue:
  • The entire first act of the game is spent on Mitchell just sort of running around at the whims of whoever happens to be in command, and it isn't until the second Act that Mitchell's revenge quest begins properly. While this normally wouldn't be an issue, the levels and story tend to run on very long, making getting to Act 2 a chore.
  • Act 2 itself has New Alaska which offers little if any navigation on where to go.
• Ass Pull:
  • Nick's characterization makes a few complete 180s for no particular reason. Shortly after getting to the Avalon Vale, when Mitchell's group is introduced to Captain Roosevelt's, Nick makes a completely unforeshadowed outburst about Mitchell being "cursed" because two ranking officers have died shortly after meeting him, only to then immediately defer to Mitchell as the new leader once Roosevelt dies under far more suspicious circumstances than the last two. Later, when Mitchell suggests teaming up with the Combine, Nick is angry at him, (rightfully) accusing him of throwing away everything they've accomplished over the last 20 years, but upon being contacted by Mitchell before the final defence sequence, Nick agrees to come to his rescue and even calls him an old friend, with not even an "I told you so" after how everything went to hell. This is due to Nick being largely composited with another character named Brad whom the "angry" lines were intended for.
  • Roosevelt's death in itself is another example. Colonel Cue and Sergeant Harvey both die under completely understandable circumstances, respectively when parts of the train they're escaping on are destroyed and while part of a convoy on the road - not much reason for someone to immediately jump to the conclusion that one of their men is "cursed". Roosevelt's death is much more suspicious, as the command bridge just explodes for no reason, leaving him Half the Man He Used to Be, well after they've pushed back the Combine forces on the ship.
  • Nick's sudden piloting of a helicopter to save Mitchell at the end, despite showing no such skills beforehand.
• Audience-Alienating Premise: Aside from the myriad controversies the game has run into, there has been criticism from fans of the franchise that the game departs way too much from established franchise staples: The cutscenes in the game, due to the fact the series is famous for its Unbroken First-Person Perspective; the large, open levels in lieu of the streamlined and linear direction; Mitchell being a fully voiced protagonist since (almost) every playable character in the series is a Heroic Mime; lastly, the premise itself involving trying to kill Freeman, due to the blatant Moral Myopia on display by the game's protagonist. Even when getting past all of this, the well-known plot twist of it turning out that Freeman wasn't involved in the plot at all, but someone masquerading as Freeman in an overly convoluted plan by the G-Man who had been preparing Mitchell as a distraction twenty years ahead of time turned people off due to rendering the basic idea of the game null.
• Awesome Music: Even though it doesn't match the music of the official Half-Life games, the soundtrack isn't that bad. Take a good listen of the main theme and the final battle music. The latter sounds like it would fit very well for 28 Days Later.
• Awesome Video Game Levels:
  • Downplayed with Black Mesa East, as it doesn't even come close to redeeming the game but has generally received more praise than the other levels due to lacking many of the problems that plague the rest of the game; the enemies don't spawn indefinitely and aren't fought in huge groups, the design is linear and compact rather than being bloated and confusing, and the pace and difficulty both remain consistent. In this regard, it feels much more like a traditional Half-Life level than its contemporaries. It also helps that story-wise, this is where the game finally lives up to its advertised premise of Mitchell being a Villain Protagonist cutting down the Resistance members and "hunting down the Freeman".
  • The 2022 M3SA revision of the Combine outpost finale. On top of being tight and linear like Black Mesa East, it has a proper mix of combat and puzzles involving dark energy generators that are clearly introduced and expanded upon, culminating in an epic Hold the Line segment against Combine soldiers and gunships at the top of the outpost that lasts only four minutes instead of fifteen. It's also one of the reworked levels to make extensive use of the previously neglected parkour system, and the minigun that was originally used on top of the train is instead used at the end of this sequence, thrown down to Mitchell by Nick and used to shoot down Combine gunships, enabling an awesome cap-off to the finale.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment:
  • Once Mitchell wakes up from his injuries, he chases down a fireman who has stolen a medkit across a few hallways, until the man is caught and killed by a Barnacle, who promptly spits him out. It's not explained who the man is, nor why he took the medkit, to begin with, and to make the scene even more out-of-place, the Barnacle in this level happens to be the only one of its kind in the entire game.
  • By the point you reach the canals in the original release of the game, Michell can't really be quantified as a One-Man Army yet because the game expected you to rush through and ignore every encounter, and the scope of the Seven Hour War is supposed to be a world-wide horror of hopeless conflict against the Combine invasion. Then for whatever reason, there's several Hunters perched really up high to snipe at the player and constant headcrab shellings are fired en masse into this one really specific place Mitchell is at, functionally breaking the story's own logic to have this single soldier fight a proverbial gauntlet of the entire invasion seemingly wanting him dead in that moment of time for no given reason whatsoever as the sequence becomes more and more absurd the longer it goes on.
  • Boston Joe's introduction, which makes a big deal about a gas leak that will blow the entire place up if anyone fires a weapon, is immediately followed by Boston Joe pulling out a shotgun and going to town on zombies without blowing things up. All this gets is a weak hand-wave that the gas leak was in "the other room", giving the impression that either A) the sole reason the cutscene even exists is to give Mitchell a wrench - since the devs apparently couldn't find any organic reason for a pipe wrench to be laying around in an industrial area, and they only decided they have a problem with randomly dropping weapons where they shouldn't be or just teleporting them into your inventory at random map triggers for this one level, since they later go right back to doing it in manners that make even less sense (even before the factory level, we have the train battle where some variety of teleport literally shits out a minigun for no reason like in an intentionally-bad Garry's Mod video) - and/or B) the dev team threw in the towel on a "firing a gun will blow everything up" section, likely because they couldn't get either the effect to work or Boston Joe to stop using guns and killing you, but did so too late to change the cutscene, and subscribes to the idea that a problem in your game stops being a problem if you make fun of it yourself.
  • When entering City 17, you meet up with a random citizen who performs a Suicide Attack on a checkpoint so Mitchell can run past. This not only comes completely out of nowhere to the point where it functions as a Jump Scare for many players, but it ultimately turns out to be pointless as Mitchell is arrested shortly afterwards anyway.
  • After emerging out of the zombie-infested Ravenholm, Mitchell comes across a town that is under attack by his own men... and almost immediately crawls down a tunnel to the antlion-infested Victory Mine, no thanks to the incredibly short length of the level. Naturally, this town features hardly any relevance to the plot and is never mentioned or visited again by the characters.
  • If Mitchell dies during the final sequence, we're given one of two special game over cutscenes, where Mitchell has some kind of vision before he succumbs to his wounds. One of them is his coming across his long-lost brother, who turns out to be none other than Adrian Shepard from Opposing Force. While this has no story significance and comes across to many players as a thinly veiled attempt at riding on the popularity of a beloved character, there is at least a little bit of foreshadowing to this scene. However, in the other death scene, Mitchell winds up inside a train filled to the brim with multiple Gordon Freemans, who silently motion for him to sit down among them. Even within the context of the story, this scene ends up being notable due to just how bizarre it is. Mitchell's reaction perfectly sums it up.
    Mitchell: What... the... fuck...?
• Breather Level: Nova Prospekt, which lies between a lengthy section of White Forest and a prison breakout, does not have a single enemy inside, giving you plenty of time to rest and stock up before said breakout. This is in great contrast to Half-Life 2, where Nova Prospekt is considered to be one of the more difficult sections of the game.
• Captain Obvious Reveal: People guessed the central plot twist as soon as "Gordon" was shown helmeted while beating up Mitchell, despite him being infamous for lacking that exact piece of headgear, in an area of Black Mesa that Gordon never explored in the series proper.
• Enjoy the Story, Skip the Game: The general consensus is that the cutscenes are enjoyable to watch in their own right, both genuinely (i.e. the surprisingly decent visuals) and in a So Bad, It's Good way (i.e. the narmtastic voice acting and writing), while the game itself, which has up to 60 gigabytes total size^note For comparison, Half-Life 2 and its two episodes are only 9 gigabytes in total, is considered to be a dud with hardly any redeemable qualities.
  Pyrocynical: The cutscenes are actually a major highlight of the game, mostly because when you're watching them, you don't have to play the game.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Some of the side characters, like Colonel Cue and Larry, are quite popular for their Memetic Mutation status and So Bad, It's Good acting.
  • The G-Man, due to being fairly close to his characterization in the main games, and his actor Rick being one of the better ones, managing to faithfully and closely recreate Mike Shapiro's portrayal (repeated "Black Messah" flub aside).
• Esoteric Happy Ending: The game ends with Mitchell and the surviving Avalon Vale crew wanted dead by both Combine and Rebels alike, not to mention the G-Man once again getting away with his machinations. Worse, the ocean is still being drained over time, and since Mitchell and his army reside on a ship, this, in turn, makes their goal to reach Borealis even harder to achieve. But at least Mitchell got revenge on the person who fucked up his face, so everything is gonna be fine after that... Right? Perhaps the only truly positive outcome of all this is Gordon Freeman going to face a bit less resistance once he goes back to City 17 at the end of Half-Life 2.
• Fanon Discontinuity: It manages to be this to fanon itself. Good luck finding anyone who actually considers this a Half-Life fangame.
• Harsher in Hindsight: The G-Man pulling out such a needlessly complex plan just to provide help to Freeman becomes this when in Half-Life: Alyx he has grown tired of Freeman to the point of "hiring" Alyx to replace him.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Related to the above, the G-Man displaying abundant Time Master powers and being a Jackass Genie got a lot of ridicule from the players. After Half-Life: Alyx had him do basically the same thing, however... not so much.
• Magnificent Bastard: In this fangame, the G-Man is portrayed as a powerful trickster. During the Black Mesa incident, he has Adam beat Mitchell up with a crowbar, wearing an HEV suit to frame Gordon Freeman, setting Mitchell on the path to revenge. Afterwards, he makes a deal with a gravely wounded Mitchell, promising him authority, power and time in exchange for killing Gordon. During the Seven Hour War, the G-Man indirectly kills anyone with a rank higher than Mitchell's. Twenty years later, he coerces Mitchell into starting the hunt and joining the Combine. Later on, the G-Man orders Adam to kill Sasha and frame Mitchell. When confronted, the G-Man reveals that since Mitchell is wanted by the Combine, Gordon will have much less trouble to deal with in City 17 and leaves Mitchell to his fate. Always keeping his charm, the G-Man manages to intertwine the deals he made with others to get the outcome he and his employers wanted.
• Memetic Mutation: Has its own page.
• Narm: Has its own page.
• Narm Charm: Just before the final defence sequence, the G-Man tells Mitchell "You have our permission to die". This line, despite being reused from a famous movie, works pretty well, given how enigmatic the G-Man is and what his overall motive was throughout the entire game. It helps that before setting off with his soldier army to City 17, Mitchell himself openly tells the G-Man how he wants his deal-induced suffering to end, so he kinda receives exactly that by the end of the agreement. But when Mitchell himself steals the line with an even cornier delivery, right before killing Adam in the final cutscene, it bounces back into Narm.
• Never Live It Down:
  • Even after the beta was considered a decent demo version with the release of the full game, Mitchell gained a lot of infamy by interrogating an enemy soldier while yelling "WHERE'S GORDUN?! WHERE IS DA FREEMAN?!" in an over-the-top manner. And when the full game was released, he got even more flak from both the critics and the audience alike, and is now forever known for two additional things: trying to kill Gordon Freeman while not giving a single damn about the future of the human race and, most of all, saying "You fucked up my face" at the end of the game, which is more or less the only reason he ever bothered to hunt Gordon down.
  • While the G-Man's voice actor's performance is far from horrible, his "Black Messah" flub will never be forgotten by Half-Life fans anytime soon.
  • Larry already feels like a character pulled from a completely different game due to his Camp Gay personality, but his comment about his mother which ends with a high-pitched squeal on the last word made him outright stand out in the Half-Life lore.
  • Adam will be forever remembered for his utterly hilarious death.
  • People will hardly if ever, forget Keemstar voicing the President of the United States, even if he had one voiceover in the entire game.
• Nightmare Fuel: Near the end of the game there is a driving section on a highway which is completely absent of any enemies to kill or even puzzles to solve in a gloomy night scenery. You only find a lonely Combine APC standing on the road and nothing else. One could expect a possible scare or an enemy ambush, but nothing really happens all the way to Nova Prospekt.
• Obvious Beta: The game's (eventual) release on Steam was noted to have been very broken almost to the point of being entirely unplayable. Most of the touted cutscenes were missing from the release, along with clunky AI and map triggers failing to fire every now and then which is not helped by how certain graphics settings can cause the game to hard crash given its poor optimization. A Day 1 patch was hastily pushed out, which seemed to have resolved the cutscenes not playing properly, but much of the problems still remain.
• One-Scene Wonder:
  • The unknown fireman that steals a medkit from Mitchell and then gets caught by a Barnacle (the only one in the whole game, in fact).
  • Keemstar as the President of the United States. Its notoriety makes it easy to forget that he only has a single scene, and it's all voiceover.
  • Colossal is Crazy as Captain Roosevelt. He barely has a few minutes to make an impression, but his Nice Guy attitude, the abrupt way he goes out, and being one of the few characters who had a voice actor who didn't feel entirely out of place means it's an impression well-made.
• Overshadowed by Controversy: When the demo for the game came out on Indiegogo, it was more or less forgotten, but with a few videos critiquing its game design and noting the possibly plagiarized assets. By the time the game proper came out, however, it became much more well-known for the development history (such as suspicions that the game was cheated through Greenlight via bots, due to money from possible investors), even greater evidence of plagiarism (especially since the game uses levels not only identical to ones from Half-Life 2, but seem to be directly taken from said game), the damage control and unprofessional responses from Royal Rudius, and the dev members and voice actors who turned their back on the game upon its release (two of which, Pyrocynical and I Hate Everything, did videos on it). Even reviews that talk more about the gameplay and story often take the time to talk about the myriad development troubles.

P-Z

• Padding: The game advertises itself with a 14-hour playtime, but much of this is due to how several tasks are made in such a way as to waste time; some players even suspect the levels were deliberately designed this way to exhaust the refund time window and make it more difficult for people to get their money back from the game. To wit:
  • Whenever the game puts the player under a time limit; a time limit before they're allowed to move on. Particular examples include an elevator wait early on in Chapter 2 and the fifteen-minute defence sequence at the end of the game.
  • The very large levels, Alaska being the worst offender, that force the player to walk across a very exhaustively huge level, sometimes with no clear direction.
  • There's one section of the game where after a cutscene pertaining to Boris telling Mitchell to wait for a few minutes, the player is left to wait in a room for a few minutes.
  • Sometime after the assault on Black Mesa East we're treated to a driving level with no enemies or puzzles whatsoever. What makes this worse is that going through a load zone while driving crashes the game and often the vehicle will fail to spawn, forcing you to walk.
• Questionable Casting:
  • Casting Keemstar of Drama Alert fame as the President of the United States. Aside from this odd role, the very act of bringing in Keemstar for voice work is, to make a long story short, controversial to begin with.
  • The host of I Hate Everything voices an Asian-American character. At first, he was even expected to do an American accent despite being British, only for them to decide halfway through to just let him speak in his natural voice, without redoing any of the lines he'd already recorded with the American accent. You can learn more about his role from IHE himself.
  • Colonel Cue and some of his men have ridiculous comedy accents: Cue himself has a heavy southern drawl, one soldier voiced by Sky Williams is Camp Gay to the extreme, and another played by Pyrocynical makes even less of an attempt to hide his accent than IHE does despite having an even thicker accent. Considering that their scenes take place right at the end of the Seven Hour War, their interactions create some major Mood Dissonance. You can learn more about Pyrocynical's opinions on said voice-acting (and on the game in general) here.
• The Scrappy:
  • Mitchell, the player character, is widely hated due to being a one-note and unsympathetic jerkass that was awkwardly shoehorned into the events of the series, with the greatest example generally seen as the game revealing he's the brother of Adrian Shephard, a well-liked established character from the original games, which comes off as an attempt to leech off of Adrian's popularity.
  • Boston Joe is probably a more typical example within the story, given his annoying voice and his misleading advice regarding the gas leak (you can shoot freely, so his introduction scene serves practically no purpose). He doesn't even serve much of a purpose in the story proper, vanishing after the very first Time Skip.
• Signature Line: "You fucked up my face," has become infamous as an example of the game's poorly-done attempts to seem edgy, terrible writing, and Mitchell's unlikability.
• Signature Scene:
  • The wait for an elevator in one of the first levels, due to highlighting how poorly the game explains what the player is supposed to do, and showcasing that a lot of the difficulty in the game comes from swarms of (and in this particular instance, frequently spawning) enemies coupled with underpowered weapons.
  • The ending scene, or as most people know it, the infamous "You fucked up my face" scene, is one of the most well-remembered (for better or for worse) cutscenes from the game and is seen as the pinnacle of the game's writing attempts to be badass or serious falling flat on its face.
• Special Effect Failure:
  • The recruits in the tutorial don't have pupils in their eyes, and their mouths don't move when they speak.
  • Sounds are inconsistent and unfitting; The knife sounds like a crowbar whenever you hit a wall with it, the Humvee uses buggy sounds, and snow sounds like metal when walked on.
  • Mitchell's face pre-time skip looks like it has tattoos on it rather than actual stitched-up gashes.
  • Colonel Cue's moustache looks like it was drawn on with a magic marker.
  • Sasha's shoulder-length hair is so stiff that it frequently clips through her shoulders as she turns her head.
  • After Mitchell rescues the children at the Cremator factory, he reaches out for the hand of one of them - a very stiff hand moving in one direction like it was straight out of Garry's Mod.
  • Adam's head turns at the most...unnatural angle during the big reveal. While his head turns normally towards the screen, the rest of his body doesn't, making it seem as if his neck is broken and the head is swivelling off of it, instead of him simply looking to his right.
  • The initial release (which was patched sometime after) didn't have all of the textures packed into the game, which resulted in numerous models or textures failing to load; the very final level of the game, in particular, has a large mountain that ends up using the purple and black checkered placeholder, making what would look impressive rather unpleasant to look at. Even the finished textures often look abysmal, the many driving levels, in particular, have roads that seem painted-on and "grass" that looks like mold sticking to the sides of the mountains.
• Stock Footage Failure: Mitchell changes his uniform between time-skips, and his first person view reflects this... but only for the weapons introduced in that chapter, I.E. In Chapter 3, his black coat with orange gloves magically becomes blue HECU camo with grey gloves if you equip an "older" weapon.
• That One Level:
  • The dockyard with cargo boxes scattered about. The beginning of it puts you up against an entire group of Combine Hunters (which are treated as uncommon Bosses in Mook Clothing in Half-Life 2: Episode Two), with not much equipment to help you out due to the level being relatively early in the game. After that, you'll be dealing with droves of Vortigaunts while you're traversing a maze made out of the aforementioned cargo boxes, with the exit not being obvious in any way (it's placed right in the middle of the maze, with no indication that it's different from the other branching paths).
  • The ending section of the canal-sewer level has you trapped in an inescapable arena. The fight starts out with four Hunters standing atop extremely tall pillars pelting you with flechettes, with the closest thing to cover being the pillars themselves and the wreckage of a Combine gunship in the centre of the arena. Once those are dealt with, the arena gets shelled with roughly 30 Headcrab shells, which will quickly flood the area with headcrabs. The only way you can make this fight even remotely fair is by climbing atop a small bunker-like structure at the opposite end of the arena and shooting from there.
  • The vehicular Escort Mission of an army truck gained a lot of infamy, not because of enemies but because of technical errors which may (and most likely will) cause the game to crash if you try quick-saving. The truck's Artificial Stupidity also helps since it tends to drive straight into vehicle barricades, getting stuck in there until you try and pull it out, which may result in the game crashing due to collision issues. The canyon your Hummer can fall into are also harmless, softlocking you and requiring you to restart anew.
  • Almost the entirety of New Alaska; an incredibly large, open mountain range that doesn't give a sense of direction most of the time. While there aren't many enemies, it's very easy to end up confused and lost while trying to traverse the level. Later on, there are snipers and laser cannons around to deal lethal damage with one shot each, and it's completely possible for them to shoot through obstacles to hit Mitchell from across the map.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character:
  • While Adam is problematic in many ways, his presence in the game could have been a good opportunity to develop some of the in-game lore. After all, he's supposed to have been one of the Black Ops soldiers encountered by Freeman and Shepherd. This could offer an entirely new perspective of the Black Mesa incident not previously explored in Half-Life or its expansions. Sadly, Hunt Down the Freeman fails to recognize this opportunity in favor of using him for a really cheap twist.
  • Nick has several moments of him being Only Sane Man in Mitchell's army, yet when he calls Mitchell out on his motivation, he ultimately defers back to him both times without much hesitation, leaving his own story arc awkwardly incomplete.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • The very premise of the game's second major story arc is right there in the name. Mitchell finally goes full Villain Protagonist and sells his Child Soldier army into service to the Combine and aids them in assaulting the Resistance members at Black Mesa East, all for the chance to finally confront Gordon. What does this lead to? Nothing. Despite the game's advertised premise, Gordon isn't actually directly relevant to the plot, and never even personally shows up as Mitchell is too late to stop Gordon from being teleported away; the man that fucked up Mitchell's face was Adam, an original character for the game he met shortly after awakening from his injuries.
  • Related to the above, you'd expect that the G-Man would be manipulating Mitchell for some grand goal considering the plan had been spanning for two decades, and unlike Gordon, Mitchell didn't have the luxury of having been placed in stasis beforehand. Instead, the final outcome of the whole thing is Mitchell becoming nothing more than a minor distraction for the Combine, a footnote, just so Freeman would have a bit easier time in City 17 — something the G-Man could have easily done himself with much less resources and time spent.
  • The raid on Black Mesa East itself could have included the familiar characters from the mainstream Half-Life 2, especially since the trailer for the very first version (which came out back in 2016, mind you) has Mitchell's squad apprehend Eli Vance, among others. Sadly, such a golden opportunity is never properly used - Eli himself is never found in person, and the player instead has to fight lots of barely distinguishable rebels.
  • It's often pointed out that Mitchell's revenge being motivated by his HECU comrades being killed by Gordon would be a very compelling motivation. Instead, they are never brought up again and he is seemingly only motivated by having his face fucked up, making his reaction to the corpses of his comrades in the prologue seem all for naught.
  • A Non-Standard Game Over reveals that Adrian Shepard is Mitchell's brother. This could have been a good way to develop Mitchell's character, for instance, if he was led to think Adrian was killed by Freeman or dealt with survivor's guilt from the apparent loss of his brother. Unfortunately, not only is this scene easily missable, but it has no relevance to the game's story whatsoever.
• Too Bleak, Stopped Caring: The game tries to be darker than Half-Life 2 proper, but given that the world was already a dystopia where humanity is on the verge of extinction, this would normally do little. Unlike Half-Life 2, however, the game provides almost no humour or levity in regards to its plot (to the point it reintegrates content that was cut from Half-Life 2 which made the world bleaker, such as the Cremator factories) and has very few likable characters to justify the players' investment.
• Took the Bad Film Seriously:
  • One of the more tragic things about Hunt Down The Freeman is how, despite the actual character being abysmally written, Mick Lauer is clearly giving his damnedest in his performance as Sgt. Mitchell, and is valiantly struggling throughout the game's nonsensical plot to add any humanity he can scrounge up to such a thoroughly unlikable character.
  • Additionally, ignoring the infamous "Black Messah" misstep, the G-Man's voice actor Rick easily gives the best performance in the entire game, with it being very easy at some points to forget that it actually isn't Mike Shapiro voicing him.
  • Paul Humphrey (the game's main music composer) made some surprisingly memorable music for the game and even tried to give Mitchell a fittingly melancholic leitmotif. He even went the extra mile to compose a 15-minute-long battle suite for the 2018 retail version of the finale.
• Underused Game Mechanic: Despite being touted as selling points, the prone and parkour mechanics are barely implemented into the game. The former effectively replaces crouching to fit under low obstructions for no apparent reason other than because it's a feature common in contemporary tactical shooters, and the latter of which is only usable at very specific, arbitrary points throughout the game.
• Unintentional Uncanny Valley:
  • Due to the fact that the game's assets are made by many different people without that much communication amongst themselves, certain models are of higher quality than others. Most NPC character models are very poorly made, which makes them look downright creepy when standing next to the high-quality, realistic model of Mitchell.
  • The grown-up Sasha in particular is a prime example of this trope, featuring a very low-quality model and textures even by Source engine standards. Compared to the highly detailed Mitchell standing in front of her, Sasha has a very pasty, pale complexion seemingly made out of only flat textures without normal or bump mapping, while her head of hair doesn't seem at all different from a crudely-chiselled block of wood.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic:
  • Mitchell spends the whole game trying to murder Gordon for the crime of... er, self-defence, really. He barely even brings up the idea that Gordon killed a lot of marines or took part (unwittingly) in causing the Cascade Resonance and the subsequent Combine occupation of Earth, which would at least be mildly understandable, in favor of groaning about a handful of facial scars. He considers teaming up with the Combine to be a worthwhile idea to accomplish this despite all the risks not just to him and his army, but to humanity as whole. Even under the premise of him being a Villain Protagonist, his motivation is so incredibly weak as to be impossible to root for.
  • The game seems to treat the surrender of the United States to the Combine as a politically motivated decision that betrays the soldiers on the ground, which doesn't quite work as intended when our group of soldiers are in the middle of deserting their positions when they hear the news. While the decision to desert isn't an unreasonable one given the circumstances, it doesn't give Larry the right to complain that they've lost the war.
• Vindicated by History:
  • A very downplayed example, but the 2016 demo, which was rightfully ridiculed upon release, has enjoyed a somewhat warmer reception now that the full game has been released. Most people agree that the demo was actually better than the final game.
  • Even less so with the final game itself, but it was somewhat redeemed by the 2022 M3SA branch, which is generally seen as a step in the right direction due to fixing many of the gameplay flaws, such as heavily simplifying level layouts to make them easier to traverse, removing some of the padding, and better integrating and/or telegraphing the parkour mechanics.
• Visual Effects of Awesome: The cutscenes are among some of the few things agreed to be good about the game due to looking surprisingly gorgeous and being one of the only times you're not struggling with the gameplay. However, they come with their own problems, such as the voice-acting and how they clash with Half-Life's usual storytelling.
• Writer Cop Out: The Gordon that beat up Mitchell actually being Adam in disguise is generally seen this way, due to it rendering the basic setup and premise of the game moot.

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