Why I hate Half-Life 2

Well, I'm playing Half-Life 2. Again.

The first time I played it through, I did it on the "easy" difficulty setting. It was impressive, yes, but I didn't like it. At all. Here's why:

• It's tedious. Run, think, shoot, live went the tagline for the original. In HL2 it should be run, get bored, shoot. The first HL managed to get the length of its levels just about right (save maybe the Zen ones), because just as you were getting bored with one level a new one comes along. In HL2 the levels go on a lot longer. Take for example the boat level, it's fun at first but it soon becomes far more tedious.
• It's less interactive. I know that in many ways HL2 has loads of interactive elements like boxes, bottles, barrels and bizarrely indestructible milk crates. But it lacks the interactions with people that HL had. Okay, when I say "people" I mean "Barneys" and "Scientists." But nonetheless, you could interact with allies, or talk to them and shoot them. In this one Gordon lowers his gun whenever he approaches someone he knows. And he can't talk to them. There's no way of striking up random conversations, no snide remarks by the Scientists, and no buddy chat from Barney. Despite the major graphical improvements of HL2, it feels less "real" because of this.
• It's more constrained. HL triumphed in terms of level design because of the tight, metallic, claustrophobic feeling of the Black Mesa facility. Only occasionally did you break out of the endless corridors and ducts, and those were the real wow moments; the dam, the cliffside. HL2 inverts this, and replaces the interiors with exteriors and vice-versa. The result is not a game that feels like you've got more freedom, but a game that feels like you've got less. Take, for example, City 17. A giant, post-industrial post-communist wasteland. But you can only take one path through it. Although this is done subtly, you are still very much aware of the fact that you are being lead in a certain direction. It's not a city, just a small collection of streets. It doesn't work like it does in the first.
• It's less original. Sequels are, by default, less imaginative than the original. HL worked so well in incorporating a naff 50s b-movie plot into the game. But HL2 seems to have stolen entire levels from HL mods; namely Poke646 (City 17's post-Commie setting) and They Hunger (Ravenholme's inbred zombie massacre). The plot of HL2 also seems to have been ripped off from another game; namely Sonic the Hedgehog. Polluting madman present throughout the game wants protagonist dead, and will use all his technologically-altered minions to achieve this. There's a final showdown with the bad guy in a floating dome thing. HL's final boss was probably one of the most unexpected things about that game, a giant floaty baby thing. In HL2 it's just a guy. Who looks a bit like Dennis Hopper.
  

So now I'm playing HL2 through again with a gig of RAM instead of the paltry 256mb I had when I first played it through (mmm crashes and lag), and it's a bit better, gone from a 2-star game to a 3-star game. But it's still not great, and nowhere near as great as everyone else would have you believe.

posted by Henry @ 11:01 am