I played through HL2 finally 2 years ago, after starting and becoming bored several times.
IMO, HL2 is one of if not THE most overrated game of all time, even if I would say Half Life 1 was one of the best of its time.
It has:
- bad level design. Any time you are in a vehicle in this game you want to kill yourself. Also whenever you are traversing through a pipe
- the story doesn’t really make that much oh sense. Kudos for how they tried to tel it, but it’s not nearly as interesting as even the first game. It’s not that you can’t follow it, there just isn’t that much detail to it.
- the gun play sucks. Pretty much all the guns are boring except for the gravity gun.
- bad voice acting
- the multiplayer sucked, apart from mods that released later.
- it’s not even the best game released that year. MGS3 and Ninja Gaiden are both better, IMO. And if you want to be generous, RE4 came out 4 months later in Jan 2005.
- it’s not even the best FPS released that year (that would be Halo 2).
I guess you could argue that it’s inportant because it’s “influential” because of the... physics, I guess? There’s nothing new with the storytelling that wasn’t done in the first game or even Riddick which came out earlier.
I’ve heard episode 1 and 2 are much better, but honestly I was so unimpressed by the original that I never tried to go back and play them.
