A few days ago, I decided to play HL2 again, since I haven't touched that game since I beat it in 2004. At the time, I liked the game, but I didn't love it.
Ten hours in, I quit. I didn't care about the Combine on my back, the repressed citizens of City 17, or Alyx Vance (who is only fascinating because of her lack of oversexualization). Midway through the level "Nova Prospekt", I decided that I had seen enough. The gunplay wasn't keeping on the edge of my seat, either. Slogging through those canals was an exercise of frustration because the narrative progressed like mollasses.
To start off, the writing. It sucks. There is nothing captivating about the dialogue. My issue with the characters, is that they act less like characters and more like questgivers. They have no hopes or dreams, they just have a job for you do and that is all they will tell you. Of course, while it's implied that most of them dream of an Earth liberated from the Combine, few of them (except maybe Eli and Alyx) explicitly mention this. They have no quirks. They have no personalities. They are just a bunch of talking dummies, all of them.
Secondly, the gunplay also sucks. The guns are mostly weak peashooters with dinky sounds to boot. For example, on normal mode, it takes at least five pistol shots to down a mere Metrocop. The gunplay is further aggravated by artificial ammo limits, forcing the player to conserve ammunition and shoot as little as possible, taking the point of a first person shooter game out of the window. It's no fun to keep running to an ammo box in the middle of a fight against a Strider because you've run out of rockets.
Thirdly, playing the game is like watching mollasses flow. You would slog through long sections, killing aliens and taking names, and your only reward would be a very brief one-sided conversation with Alyx, who tells you that you need to head to location X and kill some more Combine before they do something terrible. This repeats itself ad nauseum until the end of the game.
Furthermore, supposedly "dramatic" moments in the game, defining moments that were supposed to change the flow of the game, like when they tell you that Alyx has been taken to Nova Prospekt, inspire so little emotional reaction on part of the player because the scenes are poorly acted and lack proper gravitas.
The only reason this game won so much praise was because it lived in the shadow of game that preceded it: Half-Life. Half-Life broke ground. It did things that other games like Quake and Doom refused to do. It told a story. The AI was awesome. The guns were awesome. It was awesome. Unfortunately, when Half-Life 2 did the same things again, this time, with souped-up graphics, the impact was not as great, because we have seen this all before.
But, there is hope. Portal 2 is proof that Valve can put together a game with excellent writing, gameplay, and pacing. Let's hope they extend this knowledge to Episode 3, or Half-Life 3, whichever game comes out first.
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