I played this game twice, and tried to get to the end twice, and in both times I just WALKED AWAY. The original was actually playable and beatable in comparison.
One moment it’s a shooter, then it becomes a driving game, then it becomes one of the earliest walking sims with long stretches of nothing, then a horror game, then a tactical shooter, and it wasn’t good at any of them - it was all just cobbled together. Valve would have had a much better game if they sold just Ravenholm, the only part that actually evoked strong feelings in me.
And by this point in time I can’t help but think the funny letter G guy is just a Mary Sue to glue the game together with very little character or substance besides “man in black”.
I firmly believe the only reason this game is “beloved” is the same reason that iPhones sell just because of the logo of the company that made them. (And also because of this game every fucking company that breathes has an online DRM launcher)
Fear by Monolith and its expansions on the other hand, they were so much better despite the aiming system being unintuitive in comparison to HL the 2. Everything just clicks. I just loved Fear. But I’m sure this won’t save me from “Ubisoft target audience” allegations.
I firmly believe the only reason this game is “beloved” is the same reason that iPhones sell just because of the logo of the company that made them.
It’s more nostalgia than branding. I’ll entirely agree that half life hasn’t aged great, but what’s important is the historical context. The games were groundbreaking for the time, especially HL2 with its physics engine and gravity gun. I remember playing it just days after release then being shocked and amazed at those different systems. There just weren’t many games with that level of polish tackling such a wide scope.
Just like with watershed TV/movie/music, it seems quaint and overhyped as their innovations become the norm.
I once saw someone somewhere comment that HL2 is actually a tech demo meant to show off the physics stuff. Which I wholeheartedly agree with, and even that didn’t win me over. The game doesn’t feel like a shooter meant to be enjoyed, rather it feels like Valve flexing its muscles only because they can.
Yeah gameplay wise the game basically leaned a lot on novelty. But they are wrong to say that it lacks world building and lore because it’s scant on narrative. That’s like saying “the Quiet Place lacks world building because there is barely any narrative”. The game is excellent in using game mechanics to tell a story. Instead of relying on the storytelling mechanics of film.
Its world building and such is visual story telling.
I fucking love Highway 17 - it’s an atmospheric and enjoyable road trip and I will die on this hill.
truly dull sections - yes I’m looking at you the vehicle sections … makes playing through HL2 a slog. Just a few hours in, I didn’t want to play any more. I was done.
Totally agree with this. HL1 is one of my favorite games ever but HL2 was just boring. I tried it a few times and never finished. Opposing Force and Blue Shift are my Half Life 2 and Half Life 3.
As someone who hates open-world ubisoft style games, I’m nevertheless not much of a fan of HL2 either. I tried it multiple times at different points in my life and each time found it to feel like a slog that I end up giving up on a few hours in.
I enjoyed the 1984 aspects of the world at first, but I ultimately can’t get past how bullet spongy enemies are. Virtually every weapon feels extremely impotent except the revolver, which has very limited ammo. I began to dread every encounter with enemies because it rarely felt fun to fight them.
On my last playthrough I cheated and gave myself infinite revolver ammo, which helped me get farther than before, but even then I was struggling to push onward after a certain point, just because it felt like endless waves of enemies being thrown at me with some mildly enjoyable physics puzzles tossed in between them.
Never felt a connection with any of the characters, and without that the gameplay itself just becomes repetitive to me.
The revolver’s first shot is dead center. Use your suit zoom and you can snipe a headshot.
Other than that, use the appropriate weapon. Soften them up or flush them out with grenades. Pop around a corner and hit them with both barrels of the shotgun. And don’t be afraid to use the quicksaves liberally.
HL and HL2 definitely aren’t polished AAAA game experiences, they’re experimental games from people trying to push the limits, so it’s natural that they don’t hold up to modern games. The modern games are standing on the shoulders of Half-Life (which stands on the shoulders of Quake, Doom, and Wolfenstein).
As I said, I generally found there wasn’t enough ammo to really use the revolver more than a few times in my experience, hence why I cheated infinite ammo for it.
I don’t have any nostalgia for the half life games as I didn’t play them growing up, but I also don’t think their age is really a contributing factor. Personally I found Half Life 1’s combat to actually be far more fun due to the enemies feeling a little less sponge-y, and the gunplay/guns themselves feeling more punchy and overall just better to me. HL2 I consider a step down.
There are shooters older than HL2 that I would consider to have much better combat, like Blood (1998) or Return to Castle Wolfenstein (2001) despite their age. I understand that HL2 was trying quite number of new things, but ultimately my gripes with the combat are mostly down to what I consider to be a poor choice of damage variables in a configuration file, but that’s just in regards to my own preferences for combat in games.
not enough ammo
Once you get the gravity gun you dont need ammo. I only switched to the actual guns just to say I did. The gravity gun is so OP its not even funny.
I didn’t use the gravity gun as much as standard weapons since most of the objects available to shoot with it are usually quite large which obscured the view of the target (not a problem close up, but mid range and farther I’d have trouble with it), and I found it really janky to use in tighter spaces like hallways or smaller rooms, where the object being held would get caught up on the terrain or doorways.
handrails would also deflect objects shot with it, and a lot of the times when ambushed with a combat encounter, I wasn’t scanning the area for objects to pick up while being shot at, I would just engage immediately and return fire.
It’s a cool gadget, and perhaps others got past the issues I had with using it effectively, but overall I preferred just using a standard weapon, and in that realm the ones that were fun to use had little ammo, leaving me with the very weak pistol and smg, which I didn’t find terribly fun.
I think the pistol and SMG are intended to feel weak, to push you into other weapons that take more interesting use. For instance, half an SMG clip into a soldier could instead be one launch of a barrel from the gravity gun. Notably, you only see those soldiers after getting the gravity gun.
If you’re referring to the early cops, about half of them are around some tricky environmental kill, like an explosive barrel. But, I’ll grant there are times you’d desperately spend a magazine to land headshots with the pistol. So, I guess you’re not wrong.
From what I recall, I didn’t really enjoy using the gravity gun all that much since bigger objects had a tendency to clip terrain if they weren’t aimed quite right, and thus miss the enemy I was aiming at, which prompted me to switch back to the other weapons to finish off a gunfight. Admittedly that might’ve been just a me problem, and others had more success using it (I know the sawblades with the gravity gun were quite accurate and easy to use in ravenholm, but I don’t think they show up much after that area).
I felt like most of the game doesn’t really give you enough ammo with the non-standard weapons to really use them outside of one or two bigger fights, then I’d be back down to the smg, pistol, or shotgun (which I also felt was a little under powered unless you used the alt fire, but that chewed through ammo too quickly to be viable most of the time).
It tends not to give you enough to last an entire fight with the ammo you have on hand, but usually if you’re pushed into an arena, it will have ammo and health laying around - and not the light stuff, either. The game was coming from a Doom 3 era when ammo searching was not just a known habit, but could be done during a fight to keep you moving, so it’s perhaps an implied assumption they made from the time. But, teaching players anything while they’re under fire is going to be a very uphill battle I suppose.
The problem is that the heavier weapons like the combine rifle are only introduced in the later part of the game from what I remember (I think I stopped somewhere around the antlions last time), where as it seemed like the first half was limited to the crappy weapons, interspersed with some magnum revolver ammo as a treat. By the time I would get access to the good weapons, I’d usually have already lost my enthusiasm to continue. If I had connected more with the story I could look past all that, but since that part just wasn’t engaging with me, the combat needed to carry the experience, which it just wasn’t able to do in my particular case.
is the time shown on steam reviews accurate? cause i’d guess that it takes more than 12 minutes for a casual player to finish half-life 2
in fact i checked and the world record in speedrunning is around 36 minutes lol
If you play in offline mode (Steam Deck) Steam doesn‘t clock your playtime IIRC
Afaik it does if it resyncs. Just takes a while to update
Lots of mods for older games circumvent steam, so steam does not know about the game running. Famous example was Skyrim and Skyrim script extender. If this is the case with mmod idk
I have some similar reviews with 0 hours because I usually play a cracked version of the game and then buy it if i like it just to support the dev. Maybe that’s what was going on here.
that makes sense. maybe the mod they installed causes steam to not count the hours.
Idk, of all the ways you could criticize Ubisoft, dragging this random guy just because he didn’t care too much for HL2 (and then took the time to write down his thoughts instead just going “game bad 👎”) feels silly.
Half-Life was the same. The game doesn’t spoon feed you a narrative, the same way real life doesn’t have a narrator (at least one outside of your head).
You need to pay attention to your surroundings, listen in to NPCs talking, read posters on the wall, etc to piece together the story.
It was and is one of the cooler ways to do storytelling in my opinion. Cutscenes etc are fine but for a first person game, I love the immersion of the story happening around you rather then being loredumped on you while you’re agency is taken away from you.
Agreed. And in this line of more subtle storytelling, from the games I played from the franchise, if anything, it took all the way to Portal 2 for some things to start making sense.
I have to agree with him, honestly. HL2 was novel for its time, but if you’re playing it for the first time in 2026 then yeah, it really doesn’t hold up to modern game experiences. I also dislike games that end ambiguously or on cliffhangers, and the lack of closure provided from sequel-bait endings like HL2’s can be annoying to people who just want to play a complete story. I want to see it through to the end and get the feeling that my actions had any sort of consequence to the world, and HL2 really doesn’t provide that.
And narratively, the fact that Gordon is a silent protagonist really doesn’t make the player feel like they’re a real part of that world, and rather they’re just going along for an on-rails carnival ride. The player has no real agency to affect anything that isn’t a part of the singular route offered by the game. This would be okay if it was a role-playing game, and the player is intended to use their imagination to fill in the blanks, but HL2 is a wholly linear game where characters just bark commands at you from start to finish.
Honestly, for being a negative review, I think he was very fair about it. It’s an important part of gaming history, but that doesn’t necessarily translate into a great experience for modern players.
HL2 has a ton of story, but it isn’t spelled out in cutscenes or written down in item descriptions. It’s discussed by NPCs and inferred from the environment. You experience it all in a first person frame, without third person cutscenes or by asking someone to exposit at you. You don’t even have to go out of your way with a guide on your second monitor to unlock that info, it’s right there with you, you just have to pay attention.
You’re a person in the world and nobody will be the explaining the concept of lightbulbs or the where the combine came from or how the city was built. But you can absolutely find out more about that in the game.
But yes, we all hate the cliffhanger.
I will say that even then, it was missing a bit of “acknowledgment”. Kleiner and Alyx don’t even question where you came from or what you should be doing now you’ve suddenly arrived.
Some of that could be as simple as, if Gordon was non-silent, have him wonder questions while wandering C17: “What the…how long have I been gone? What the hell happened to Earth?”
They don’t question it because all kinds of weird interdimensional shit is going down. But they absolutely react with surprise when you first show up.
I mean, Kleiner saying “I had expected more warning!” is a sort of mixed surprise. If he’s been gone for 20+ years, the natural reaction I might expect is “What…? That’s impossible! We all thought you were dead! Or lost in Xen forever!” Heck, even Kleiner’s reaction to the “slow teleport” you and Alyx take late in the game is much grander. “I had…given up hope of ever seeing you again!!”
“What the…how long have I been gone? What the hell happened to Earth?”
But, you KNOW what happened to the Earth. What would spelling it out add to the story, except replacing the wonder and accomplishment with a boring bit of exposition.
Having Gordon be a silent protagonist adds hugely to the first person experience of the game. Sure, you can add dialog and questions and elaborate, but that would detract from the experience. Picasso could have also added pointers to each of the characters in Guernica to explain how they relate to the bombing of the city, and it would make the painting a lot clearer… and a lot worse.
I want to compare Half-Life with SOMA here (so spoilers for both). They’re both great experiences, but Gordon is silent while Simon won’t shut up. Simon needs to asks questions because the story requires you to understand some things, and some people need very basic explanations. When I played SOMA, I kept waiting for there to be a secret plottwist that Simon was copied incorrectly and was thus either braindamaged, or modified not to recognise reality for a specific purpose. No, that didn’t happen, Simon is instead an absolute moron who completely fails to realize that everyone constantly being copied means that he too will be copied instead of having his mind relocated. The game treats this as some kind of big realization, when it was in fact absolutely blatantly obvious to anyone paying attention. It’s literally the core of the game. Simon, being a moron, then takes this out on the person helping him, because he’s a moron.
Not only is the main character an idiot, I’m being railroaded into taking decisions that are stupid, which are then reacted to as if I couldn’t possibly have foreseen this, implying I (the player) am probably really stupid too. That was a huge detraction in SOMA. Simon is an idiot for the sole purpose of getting the information to you, the player, because apparently you need to be informed like you’re some kind of idiot too.
On the other hand, Gordon doesn’t talk. That’s a BIG restriction, but it also means you don’t even have to option to ask questions. On the other hand, you don’t need to; all the reasonable questions you might have are answered in the game by environmental storytelling. Who are the combine? Well, we see them beating up random humans, speaking a weird garbled message, we hear speeches by Breen, we see the combine raid random apartments. It’s very clear who they are without Gordon needing to ask about it. It’s like starting a book in medias res, which is quite common in writing.
Half-Life 2 assumes you can make connections, and you need to do so because Gordon doesn’t talk. SOMA assumes you’re an idiot, and reinforces that constantly by Simon talking to people like an idiot.
That feels like a bit of a hate train on SOMA that’s not really relevant. We often dislike character idiocy, especially when it’s our player. But speaking protagonists can be done well - Dead Space 2 made the move, and even ported it back when they finally did a DS1 remake.
Perhaps the only major issue with using environmental storytelling to give City 17’s base exposition is that the game is both a sequel, and intended as an entry point. I remember as a kid playing HL2 (with very little knowledge of HL1) and as soon as I saw the aliens in gas masks corralling everyone, really wondered what sort of story I missed in the first one. Leaving people to figure things out is definitely cool, I’m just offering ways to point out clearly that you, the player, didn’t miss anything key, because in today’s media deluge, often the reason for that feeling is because a story is slapdash and poorly written - as opposed to simply hiding the details in plain sight for the player to find.
Interestingly, there are some notes in an art book where the G-Man originally gave a longer opening speech to explain what’s happened in your absence, but they removed it. Overall it was probably the right move, but I’m curious how it would have felt.
Yeah I played it for the first time last year and I couldn’t really get into it. Gave up a few hours in.
Not to play the devils advocate but they do have an argument. Not in the physics point because physics haven’t been done to death so that part of Half-life 2 IMO is still fresh. But the rest of Half-life 2 can be dull and boring and nonsensical if played today. Half-life 2 was such a cultural shift that everything great about it has been dissected, analyzed and improved upon wherever possible.
Much like Half-life 1 the things that made the game great are industry standard now. You’re used to the greatness so all you see are the flaws. The boat section is too long, the car section is poorly paced, the story is too cryptic, the list probably goes on. But anyone who played it at launch knows how fucking sick the game is because there was nothing else like it.
That’s an insane claim to me. HL2 set the bar for worldbuilding. From the guy muttering “don’t drink the water” in the train station, to the people and vortigaunts building homes in the sewers, to the stick legged stalkers waddling around the citadel, HL2 took “show don’t tell” to heart. It was the most immersive experience anyone had played in a video game up to that point, or for years after.
I’ll grant you that other games have learned a lot from it, but I would say the vast majority haven’t. Games still come out today where everything needs to be spoonfed to the player literally for them to stop and process what they’re looking at, instead of just running and gunning mindlessly.
When you say HL2 can be boring and nonsensical if played today, the first thing that comes to mind are all the people who turn movie subtitles on, and then for 75% of the runtime their eyes are in the bottom 1/3 of the screen, not taking in any of the visual information the filmmaker is putting in front of them. Like, yeah, HL2 is quite boring when you’re not looking at it.
Friends of mine who played at two different points far after launch still found it to be just as great, even if the physics and facial animations were no longer best in class.
I still like its facial animation more than most Danes. They had tools that even set up random NPCs to have full lipsync and expressions for minor lines, without a mocap studio. Most AAA work these days doesn’t have that, or they dedicate such animation to when you’re in a zoomed in view to receive quests.
I don’t care much about the Danes either.
Autocorrect has been extremely vicious today about anything that’s not in a 20-year-old dictionary.
I personally played it some time after Portal 2, probably 2015 or so. I found it great, particularly as far as lore and pacing are concerned. Sure, there are bits that drag, characters that aren’t well written, and plot/lore details that are too ambiguous, but I’d much rather that than hand-holdy, surface-level plot of most similar shooters, or plot told through YouTube videos and flavor text like many modern shooters. IMO, its still one of the best at what it does, and its still a personal favorite for that reason.
I tend to agree with this. I had given up on PC gaming by 2004 so did not play HL2 until the Orange Box on Xbox in 2007 and my reaction was “Jesus this is boring!”
I’ve tried to replay it a couple of times since then, most recently on Steam Deck, but it just doesn’t click with me and I give up around the Canals.
Reading the comments aged me more than anything
The bridge crossing level and using the crossbow to crucify combine soldiers were about the best parts of the game as I remember it.
Bro spent hours playing HL 2 and then had to turn on godmode? Does he only have 1 hand or something? What happened?
I did that for Control when I played that, I was just ready to be done. Im guessing by every other part of the review the person was also just ready for the game to end
0.2 hours to be exact.
Using MMOD doesn’t track playtime for the man game
Ah good catch, that means they lied as well.
He said that he played through it in PS3 back in the day
Not only the author of the post frame the ineffably marvelous Ubisoft for their Assassin’s Creed only, or the people in the organization who are not even related to the case, and for literally unknown reason, but also the author of the review feels like a disrespectful bigot who has likely a bad time yet enough to make a choice to inscribe their pure hatred into someone’s effort, history, and indeed novelty. One might want to suggest them to try creating anything at least remotely marvelous to the subjects, they try speaking at, with their own hands…
Such a deep sorrow some people do not care about their actions, about anyone, including artists, developers, people in general… and ruin this world in hatred and utter, disgusting unfairness…
You do you, @[email protected] and that reviewer, and let’s hope no one will state something so awful about your work after decades, hatefully believing their word has any weight the world outside their mind of hatred.
A dear kindergarten is it…
Dear lord, I actually hope you used AI to write that nonsense.
I never use LLM except for pentesting or experimental/medicine.
Meanwhile, I am sorry to know that you found it nonsense.experimental/medicine
You use AI for literally its most dangerous possible use case. And I assume you used a mediocre translator for everything else. Try DeepL, I found it has good results most of the time.
Sorry, no. And I am sorry you found LLM useful, and consider experimental/unverified data “dangerous”, likely inadequately or for the sense of hateful trolling, and it’s hard to live that way, I presume…
Related:
- https://lemmy.world/post/41419554/21487153
- https://mander.xyz/post/45102281/24408089
- https://lemmus.org/post/41151011/21366171Removed by mod
Stanning for Ubisoft isn’t the look you think it is.
Assassin’s Creed Odyssey Watch_Dogs 2 
// Image source: Personal backups of screenshots
Watch Dogs 2 is a weird one. I absolutely understand all the criticism and see the flaws, but I still play it and the breaks between two runs only get shorter. I love its rendition of SF and the Bay Area, the game has that je-ne-sais-quoi that draws me towards it.
Watch Dogs Legion though? Oh my goodness…
Yea. It’s easy to make a pretty game these days. Pretty is not equal to good.
Note that I will fully admit Ubisoft owns some decent IPs. Owning decent IPs does not make them a good company.
Hey I have some pretty screenshots too!
Thank you!
