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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 9632631" data-attributes="member: 18">There are at least two of us!I've been a long-time HL2 "hater"* in the sense that I don't think it's all that. I remember playing it in 2004 and being like "This is it? Nice art direction and gameplay that feels like it has barely moved on from 1998? This is what people are saying is amazing?".Because shooters moved on a LOT from 1998 to 2004. We had Halo, we had Far Cry 1, we had NOLF, we had Red Faction, we had Deus Ex (I mean, not a shooter but...) and just countless others - in fact in many cases a game came out and then had a sequel between the time HL1 and HL2 came out.HL2, like I can't deny it had a really strong visual style, and it had a slightly more intelligent and grown-up feeling story than was common, and whilst the faces were uncanny valley, it was kind of the first game I can think of with "proper" facial animations, but... like gameplay innovations? Basically none, in an era when gameplay was being brilliantly innovated. In fact, its gameplay seemed like an actual throwback, just hunting for health packs and ammo.Ok but gameplay doesn't have to be innovative, right, it just has to be good? But there too, HL2 falls down. Its gameplay was like... good-but-not-great. It was solid. It had some nice level design, but also had some trash level design, particularly any time you were using a vehicle - the vehicles really felt like total trash, especially compared to games like 2000's Halo, or Far Cry 1, which came out earlier in the year than HL2. The levels also lacked the sweeping verticality or complexity that a lot of other games of that era managed. And whilst some had a great sense of being "real places", many did not.The physics too weren't very impressive to me - Jurassic Park: Trespasser did most of the same in 1998, and by 2004 it was unsurprising to see some physics in shooters - hell, again Far Cry 1 had arguably better physics than HL2, but it just didn't have the gimmicky gravity gun. Halo had some physics iirc!Enemy AI was completely sub-par. This was again, 4 years after Halo, which had much, much better AI (by which I mean scripted behaviour that makes them seem real and to do seemingly-smart things, nothing more than that), and one of the cool things about the original HL was that the enemies felt relatively smarter than was normal for shooters - but that trend didn't continue. Far Cry 1 also had much smarter and more dangerous enemies, AI-wise.It's weird because HL1 was amazing to me, a revelation, but HL2? Just another game, and I've never understood the hype of any part of it except the visual design and the face animation (both of which were pretty unusually good). The lack of criticism for the bad part - of which there were many - is also fairly surprising to me.This is something that seemed to happen fairly regularly from 2000 until about 2015 or 2017 - a solid 8/10 game from a "beloved" studio got greeted and treated like it was a 10/10 super-stunner. It seems like that's largely stopped happening now, and I think it's been on the decline ever since BioShock Infinite, which was a particularly bad example of this. When it got released, got insane "BEST GAME EVER MADE"-type reviews from a lot of publications, but was an actually not-good shooter, like 7/10 at best, had increasingly ditched any semblance of "RPG elements", and had a frankly stupid and incredibly contrived story that, depending on how you look at it, is either mildly and lazily racist, or really, really racist in the special way only well-meaning well-educated wealthy white guy who thinks he's solved it all can be. But that's a whole other story, and BioShock Infinite was only overrated for about 18 months to two years before people started asking why the hell it got such good reviews, so doesn't really fit this list.* = I mean, I actually quite like it and think it is a good game, but like, not a top-tier incredible game and never was.Yeah weed ain't the one...</blockquote>

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