Half-Life 2 is almost five years old, but I am constantly reminded of the game because it is built on the wonderful Source engine, which I still tend to use for map-making. Perhaps more evidently, it is still the #1 PC game of all time according to Metacritic. Also recently, Gordan Freeman, the game's iconic main character, just won the "All Time Greatest Video Game Character" vote at GameSpot. This all baffles me, because I thought the game was awful.
Not just "I didn't fancy the game" awful, but "this game actually won awards?" awful.
I remember back in 2004 and leading up to the game it being hyped to a large degree. The original Half-Life was considered an excellent game, and while I had not played it at that time, I was rather excited to play the sequel, given all the positive press. The graphics looked impressive, and with such glowing reviews behind it, I was all but assured that it was to be a masterpiece.
Yet the more I played the game, the more I was certain I was living in some kind of bizarro-world where "excellent" was some kind of code word that reviewers used to mean "incomplete at best."
I understand that I'm expressing an unpopular opinion, so I suppose I should clarify before continuing. I'm not trying to insult anyone who liked the game and I certainly don't hate Half-Life 2. I think was an OK game with some wonderful elements. The level design was spectacular in several ways (Adam Foster could teach them a thing or two, and he will, now that Valve hired him). The physics were unheard of. The gravity gun was pretty neat. While all of these represent an impressive tour-de-force for the Source engine, they do not wholly constitute an incredible game. What was missing?
For starters, story development.
Who is Gordon Freeman? We don't really know. While Valve Software was busy showing off their new Source Engine, things like character development seemed to fall by the wayside. Their idea of making you feel important in the game is having every NPC that sees you shout, "Ah! Gordan Freeman!" as if you're some kind of super-human prodigy that was sent to save them. A man so impressive that no one else could have done the job. And Gordon Freeman is an impressive man in many respects, but here's the rub: All of the things you do in this game could have been done by any other NPC in the game just as well.
I'm not exaggerating. Your "role" in the story is little more than going from point A to point B, causing various people and things to die along the way. You don't need to be a super-intelligent, MIT-grad physicist to complete your objectives, in fact a mentally deranged man with a passing knowledge of firearms would do just as well, if not better. Valve attempts to play up the fact that Gordon is a renowned (perhaps even infamous) scientist, yet who Gordon is happens to be entirely irrelevant to the actions he does. Serious Sam would have actually been a better character archetype for the role you carry out.
Some have claimed that Gordon is some kind of mutable person who is supposed to take on whatever characteristics to wish him to, or that he isn't anything except what you make him. This is a poor excuse for having no character development. I could see how that would be the case in the context of Deus Ex, Oblivian, Fallout 3, System Shock 2, Fable, or a host of other games where this is actually true. But not for Half Life 2. Here you are a man with a gun who does nothing but gun, with the occasional driving about and token stacking of cinder blocks to help you cover the distance you need to cover.
Storyline wasn't the only part that was woefully lacking. There were other glaring holes, like the game-play.
The game itself was one lonely mission, your sole objective being to save one guy and transport some bullets into a few key people's faces, if you can. You did your hitman-esque tasks as people on the sidelines cheered you on to... wherever your next destination might be. A huge portion of the game was literally spent in transit, and it's safe to say that if some bullets had been at the right place at the right time at the very end of the game (anyone's bullets mind you), the whole ordeal would have been unnecessary. There were already resistance fighters in the city, so its not as if you actually needed to travel everywhere to deliver the bullets to their fleshy destinations.
The weapons in the game were also a disappointment. Not all of them: The revolver and shotgun both had satisfying sounds and a well-perceived kick. The Combine assault rifle was rather satisfying to shoot as well. The main culprits here were the pistol and smg, the unfortunate workhorses of the earlier parts of the game.
Most of the weapons made for some oddly pathetic sounding combat. It wasn't "BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM", and then a scramble to cover as you reload. It was instead an embarrassingly farcical "click click click, plink plink plink." The reload time on all weapons wasn't something that made you run for cover, in fact, for the majority of the game you can just stand in one place while shooting and reloading at your leisure.
Weak-feeling weapon actions may seem like a minor point, but adding a decent punch to combat, as well as adding a good measure of desperation (loud sounds, big knocks, long and dangerous reloads) can really affect the way game-play feels. They are some of the more significant sounds in the environment of a first person shooter. If you don't think sound adds a lot to video games, try playing an immersive game with muted sound some time and you'll see what I mean.
Compare how combat feels in Half Life 2 to the Call of Duty franchise, especially the later ones. Both feature urban combat, yet Call of Duty has the feeling of real, gritty, desperate fighting, and Half Life 2 feels like you're playing a cartoon. I admit it's a little unfair to compare Half-Life to CoD, since CoD was distinctly going for realism - CoD actually won the "Outstanding Achievement in Sound Design" from the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences for their true-to-life sounds in the first game - but it illustrates how the feeling of combat can be largely affected by things that the Valve team apparently deemed trivial.
Let me also address the puzzles. The puzzles in HL2 weren't puzzles so much as they were excuses to show off the physics. They were terribly rudimentary (Make the ramp float! Make the seesaw turn the other way! Weigh this thing down!) and so words like "challenging" or "entertaining" did not come to mind. If the intended market for this game was something like physicists, or perhaps children looking for something to show-and-tell their 4th grade science class, I'd understand. And don't tell me that puzzles any harder would have been a turn-off from the game. Tomb Raider's puzzles back in the 90's were far harder and far more interesting. Compared to Tomb Raider, which did not have the luxuries of Havoc physics, Half-Life 2's puzzles were of a laughable quality.
The only thing I'm going to say about G-man is that, as far as the first two games are concerned, the "G" stands for "reusable plot device."
Perhaps Valve didn't care about puzzles, or game-play, or story development. Perhaps they already knew that they had enough textures in their engine to woo the common denominator, and most people would be thrilled to play it no matter what the other parts were like, so long as the game was pretty.
Half-Life 2 certainly won the beauty contest, but I don't recall excellent games being made on shiny bits alone. I don't expect that perception to change, though, so long as we keep rewarding shallow games. I hope in the future that we aren't so easily impressed by eye candy set inside a mediocre game.
A few asides: some people have asked me what I do consider to be a good FPS. Some examples: System Shock 2, Deus Ex, and Thief 1 and 2. There are certainly many more, but those were the first to come to mind.
Also aside, for some excellent fan-created story and levels, see Minerva. And for fan-created Gordon Freeman with an actual personality, see Freeman's Mind
