Reviews VideoGame / Half Life 2

This game hasn't agened well.. which is sad, because it predecessor DID

I’m here in 2023, many years after the two games and their expansions were published. For the last months, I’ve been playing all of them for the first time. Back to back. And I’ll say: I agree with the reviews here.

I loved the first Half-Life, as well as Opposing Force and Blue Shift. The atmosphere, the combat, the weapons, the enemies, everything. The second Half-Life, however, was disappointing when playing it right after its predecessor. I’ve read here that it suffers a lot from "Seinfeld" Is Unfunny, but I don’t agree (at least, I don’t think it’s only that). That wouldn’t explain why I loved the first game, which supposedly suffers as much, if not more, of that problem. There must be something else.

The story is very poor. The first game had an Excuse Plot, but it still felt like it had exactly what it needed to work. The first game only tells you that an experiment has gone bad and you must go to the other side of the base to fix it, while avoiding the marines that want to kill you, but it doesn’t really ‘’need’’ more explanation. The second game needed more than the first game, but it still took the same approach, which just didn’t work. As Grandmaster Kiramid Head said in his review: ”They don't properly set up the plot, they just throw the player into a situation and expect them to figure out absolutely everything between long segments of driving and running for your life. I don't want to be spoon fed the plot, but having to look at vague newspaper headlines on the ground and on walls to get the most basic facts of the backstory is just plain ridiculous. Did a cut scene kill the developers' parents or something?” Seriously, it’s amazing that at no point the game actually tells you who the Combine (the main villains) ARE.

The variety of enemies is lackluster. Most of the time, you’ll be fighting one of four enemies: soldiers, headcrabs, zombies or antlions. There are sub-kinds of each of them, especially in regards to zombies, but it makes the game feel repetitive, and even breaks the immersion (Earth is supposed to be taken over by an interdimensional empire with an army that conquered it in 7 hours, and all you see is a lot of humanoid grunts that feel like a reskin of the marines from the first game). It’s disappointing when comparing it to the first game, which felt much more diverse.

The weapons are underwhelming when compared to the ones from the first game. In the first game, there was a good variety of them (and that’s before the additions from Opposing Force), each of them had its own niche, each of them felt useful when played up to its strengths. Not to mention that there are some original weapons that were an interesting addition, like the hivehand or the Tau cannon. The only weapon I didn’t like was the snarks, and I think that was only because it had a very poor placement (it had the misfortune of working only against human enemies but being introduced only two chapters before human enemies almost completely vanish from the game), but hey, one bad weapon out of more than a dozen, that’s great. The weapons from the second game felt weak, because of a combination of poor damage against enemies and little ammo capacity: you’re likely to run out of ammo in the middle of a shootout because the enemies tank bullets like sponges, and you can’t carry barely any ammo. It’s as if the developers wanted the player to use the gravity gun which is given very early in the game, and as a result they made the other weapons crappy, so as to encourage the players to use the only weapon that matters for them. And, as erttheking35 said in his review, “the weapons are nothing special, just your generic standard FPS weapons minus the gravity gun”, there are no cool additions here like the hivehand or the Tau cannon, apart from the gravity gun.

As other reviewers have said, the physics puzzles end up feeling shoehorned. They’re something clearly from a videogame and not something you’d encounter in real life. While the first game had examples of this as well, at least there each puzzle felt unique (the only case of “I’ve done this before” was the Pit Worm fight), as opposed to the second game where the seesaw puzzle gets repeated endlessly.

The levels are quite generic. Black Mesa was awe-inspiring, with each section of the base feeling unique and having its own atmosphere. Xen, for all its flaws (I liked it much more than I expected given what I’d read before playing, but that’s not the point), at least felt unique, especially its section in Blue Shift. In the second game, apart from the nice detail of the oceans being drained, thus causing devastation seen across the levels in the form of dried rivers, there’s nothing else that stands out in most of the levels. It’s all the same: go to a ruined place which wouldn’t feel out of place in any another videogame with the appropriate setting (for example, the F.E.A.R. games), shoot all the soldiers there and the occasional headcrab / zombie / antlion, and move to the next place. The levels I would spare are Ravenholm, where the zombie apocalypse setting and Father Grigori make it unforgettable, and the first half of Nova Prospekt, for giving the player the chance to command an army of antlions.

And finally, there are other questionable points. Vehicle controls don’t work very well, although I won’t elaborate since I’ve never heard anyone say they were right. On the other hand, the second game was not only harder than the first game, at least for me, but in a way that felt unfair and tedious. The first game rewarded the player for not rushing to fights shooting like a madman, but instead checking the area and planning ahead, choosing well which weapon to use, looking for possible environmental advantages, taking advantage of chances to ambush enemies, etc. For me, this meant playing “smart” felt easy, but at the same time satisfactory. The second game usually doesn’t let the player do that unless it’s looking around the area for things to throw at the enemies using the developers’ favorite child, the gravity gun, which is something that’s only done well in Ravenholm. Combine it with the weapons being worse in several aspects, as I mentioned earlier, and you have tedious fights with crappy weapons which the game doesn’t let you work around unless it’s with the gravity gun. What’s worse, the second game ‘’loves’’ to throw at the player hordes of respawning enemies without warning. Apart from a couple of Ospreys dropping marines and the occasional headcrab rain, both of them clearly telegraphed, the only parts with respawning enemies in the first game I can think of are some headcrabs in a cave in "Gonarch’s Lair" and some pit drones in a sewer in "Foxtrot Uniform". In the second game, it’s common to have fights where you keep shooting at enemies until you realize after a while “yeah, these guys won’t stop coming, this isn’t what the game expects me to do”.

The saddest thing is, I discovered a Youtube channel called “Radiation Hazard”, and he has an excellent compilation of cut content from the beta. I watched it, and all of that cut content, had it made to the final game, would have fixed all of my problems with the game. A much more interesting story, with a more engaging atmosphere and more unique levels that actually stand out. Tons of different enemies, that actually make the Combine feel like an interdimensional empire. A good variety of weapons. Seriously, I don’t understand it. Apparently, the developers scrapped lots of those things because “they weren’t good enough”… Did they really think the final product was better than that?

The game isn’t actually bad. It has a lot of good things, it’s just that other games have done them better… OK, I can see where the people saying this game suffers from "Seinfeld" Is Unfunny are coming from. It’s just that other games that also suffer from that effect (for example, the first Half-Life) have a more cohesive experience and, when those innovations eventually get copied, the overall result is still good because the whole card castle doesn’t fall down without those innovations. Half-Life 2, to some extent, is a Dancing Bear that hinges on things like its then-revolutionary physics engine and facial animations, and the overall experience without them is quite disappointing. For someone playing in 2023, the first game was very fun even if it no longer feels innovative, while the second game feels like a showcase for a long-outdated physics engine that isn’t that fun unless you have nostalgia from when you played it when it was innovative.

Half-Life Alyx, from what I’ve seen in Let’s Plays, showed how future installments don’t necessarily have to suffer from the same mistakes. In my opinion, that game did right many things that Half-Life 2 did wrong. Even if the Half-Life 2 story was poor, the setting is absolutely incredible, and Half-Life Alyx proved it by playing to its true potential. Unfortunately, 1) we all know what happens with Half-Life 3, 2) being a side-story / spin-off, Valve likely felt creative freedom that wouldn’t feel with a main installment, and 3) for years Valve has only released games that are a Dancing Bear.