4/5 ★ – Supergamerguy's review of Half-Life 2.

Half-Life 2 is a good game, but it hasn't aged as well as longtime fans would like to remember. What has aged well is its approach to storytelling, putting plot progression into the player's control (rather than solely in the game's). Without a single dedicated cutscene, Half-Life 2 takes the player on a journey in media res, where the player knows just as much as Gordon Freeman does at any given moment. One minute you'll be fighting off waves of Combine, trying desperately to survive, and the next minute you'll be talking with a major character, trying to find a way to escape or break through Combine defenses. This makes for a very fluid experience, as the player hops from combat to exploration, then onto dialogue or a stealth section, etc. What makes this even better is the new physics engine, which expands on the first Half-Life's environmental interactivity. Just about any object in the game can be stacked, thrown, or used as platform in gameplay. When combined with the new gravity gun, this makes for engaging and experimental puzzle design throughout the entire game. What's not so engaging, however, is the weapon sandbox. To be fair, I did use Half-Life 2 Mmod in my playthrough, and it's improvements made things better than I understand them to be in the vanilla game. This does not mean that the core design isn't flawed regardless. To start, the grenades are just terrible, sporting a relatively tiny damage radius when detonated (despite showing a large explosion animation). This makes them only consistently useful when the game requires them be used (forcing the player to blow up turrets and such). A similar situation befalls the shotgun, being largely unwieldy and low-damage when compared to the other weapons in your arsenal. The shotgun has little to no knockback or stun effect on enemies (even with the double-barrel shot!), and does fairly low-damage at any range other than a few feet in front of your target, making its use an unworthy risk in just about any combat situation. Furthermore, weapons like the crowbar, pistol, and SMG become quickly outclassed by their midgame counterparts: the Gravity Gun, Revolver, and Pulse Rifle. This leads to unnecessary bloat in weapon menuing, especially considering that even the Revolver soon becomes only good for killing headcrab-related enemies in one shot. At least the Pulse Rifle, Gravity Gun, and RPG are well-designed with few flaws, making the late-game combat more satisfying than the earlier sections of my playthrough. Another issue sprouts up in the two vehicle sections, where players are stuck driving either a boat or a car for *at least* an hour during each section. The vehicle gameplay is pretty fun, but it more than wears out its welcome by the one hour mark (let alone the almost *two hours* it can take for new players to figure out where to go and what to do). This is an issue a game like Halo 2 would run into and later remedy in its sequels, so I hope Half-Life 2's two expansions tone down the monotony (whenever I get around to playing them). And speaking of monotony, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention this game's visuals. Now, I don't have a problem with the quality of this game's models, as they don't pose an problem for me trying to get immersed in the world this game crates. What I do take issue with is the aesthetic, which presents both a subjective problem and an objective problem to players in the modern era. I don't love the aesthetic (dull, gray cities with tall buildings are equally uninteresting to me in contemporary titles like Halo 2 and Halo 3: ODST), but it's not really a big enough issue to detract from my overall experience with Half-Life 2. What *is* a detractor is how often the game unintentionally hides progression behind poor environmental clarity. Too many times in my playthrough did I run around trying to open every door, talk to every NPC, explore every alleyway, etc., just to pause the game and consult a guide to figure out what to do next. Almost every time, the answer was "there's a hall/door/platform you need to find" that blends in exactly with the surrounding environment, giving no indication it could be used to move on (assuming it was even visible in the first place). This turned some exploration or combat sections from captivating into immensely frustrating. Ravenholm is the chief example of this, gating off progression behind ugly, monochrome texture palettes and random doors and hallways stuck behind corners or enemy gauntlets. And on that topic, Valve confusingly decided to implement respawning enemies as a prevalent game mechanic? I have limited weapon ammo, health, and energy, yet I was constantly finding myself besieged by endless waves of enemies in the game's main combat section, always dreading having stay in one area too long or backtrack a little (for exploration or ammo gathering purposes). This was made even more frustrating by the prevalence of health items and simultaneous lack of energy recharges. My suit's energy level was rarely above 80% my entire playthrough, meaning that my extra armor could be melted away at any given point in large enemy engagements, leaving me open to lethal damage in two or three hits. This annoyed me to no end, and even lead to a few infuriating death loops in the late-game. This came to a head in the final full chapter, "Follow the Freeman", where I was desperately fighting off endless waves of Striders and Combine with little health to spare, thinking that the game should have been over with sometime in the previous chapter. Although I'm glad I pushed through it, that chapter almost had me quit the game for good (due in no small part to each Strider taking a ludicrous *5 rockets* to take down, and that's with perfect aim and refilling your rockets at the nearest rocket ammo box *at least* once under heavy enemy fire). Despite all that, Half-Life 2 remains a good experience overall, if one that is fairly overblown in just how perfect it may have been in the past. New players should probably look for gameplay mods (like Mmod) and/or remastered textures/models for a less janky experience, just to make this game's flaws less of a hassle over two decades later.