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Its not an awful take, its my personal opinion and feeling I got from playing the game. I was a HUGE fan of Half Life 1 and was looking forward to Half Life 2. I still remember playing the Uplink Demo for Half Life 1 when it first came out and was really something different.
One of the best things about Half Life 1, imo, was the atmosphere, the feeling of isolation that you got, yeah, there were NPC scientists and Barney, but they never lasted long, and you had the freedom to just shoot them if you were so inclined. Half Life 2 lacked the atmosphere of the first one. It no longer felt like a claustraphobic isolation horror game like the first did to me.
The introduction of Alyx, a non killable companion ruined the isolation aspect and the atmosphere of the entire experience changed vastly between the two games. I found Alyx incredibly annoying. Half Life 2 felt more like some sort of generic adventure, a sandbox, with the more open ended design and the incredibly mind numbingly dull vehicle sections. The unkillable NPCs and increased focus on story, no longer made it feel like the same kind of game as the first. You were no longer isolated, trying to survive, you were now watching a story, playing along. It helped to start the incredibly annoying trope of turning games into movies that has pervaded gaming since that time. I want to play the game, not walk through listening to dialogue of an NPC. It fundamentally changed the game from an FPS game to a kind of story driven adventure game, taking agency away from the player.
The gravity gun was cool sure, but it was a gimmick that got old for me pretty fast.
Now, I am not taking anything away from the game. It is a great game, no doubt, but it just did not feel like a proper sequel to Half Life 1 for me. Even story wise, there were barely any connections made between the first game and the sequel, it could've easily just starred Alyx instead of Gordon Freeman. Now I heard they added some things to tie the two games together in one of the Episode follow ups, but I could never get through to the end of the original Half Life 2 because it was so mind numbingly dull and never bothered picking up any of the latter episodes. So, I am strictly judging it on my experience of playing through the original game back when it first came out.
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