>>16552208
Gotta say, it's a good game, but a lot of potential was wasted by
>Having you on your own for 95% of the game instead of fighting with other grunts
>Having you wake up so late in the catastrophe
>Having you be the "good guy" again, and not actually being part of the clean-up
Fighting against mainly guards and scientists for the first few levels would have been fun, instead you fight against these zero-effort reskins of Grunts (they don't even have any voice lines, fucks sake) and team up with scientists and guards. It feels more like playing a reskinned Freeman than actually playing a grunt from the original.
Race-X or whatever is kind of ok, but I don't really see why they needed to make that a separate thing from Xen and not just different types of them. Also if they really felt the need to include humans, they could have just made Barney varieties with shotguns and SMGs, and maybe even the occasional scientist with a pistol or something.
>>16552245
>genuine soul like HL2
Half-Life 2 feels like the single most streamlined and focus-group tested game of that decade, like they were just going down a checklist.
Enemy variety is basically zero, other than zombies and antlions you either fight combine or "bosses" that you can only destroy with the RPG, all the weapons are unfun too use and unoriginal (barring the gravity gun, and even that is mostly included to show of the physics engine), the setting is dull, having you spend most of the game in some variety of decaying vaguely Eastern European area until you get to the citadel, and even that is mostly boring, huge, empty rooms with metallic textures.
Don't get me wrong, I had a lot of fun with Half-Life 2, but I never really replay the campaign unless it's with SMOD or something.
Half-Life 2 is great for all the mods it spawned, but the base game is kind of, well, underwhelming.