Over the years, Valve has mostly shifted their focus towards selling games through Steam and enabling gambling addictions through Counter-Strike: Global Offensive rather than making new titles, but even with their reduced output, they were still responsible for some of the most iconic franchises in all of PC gaming. As a console player, though, this means that I haven't actually been able to experience most of their games, and while I do have fond memories of sinking 30-50 hours into Team Fortress 2 back in the 5th Grade, the limited capabilities of my Mother's MacBook turned every match into a PowerPoint presentation with the occasional low-res explosion of blood and gore. Like Deus Ex, my best bet to experience Valve's debut title was by emulating its PS2 port, and while I would say that I liked Half-Life overall, I also had huge issues with it that prevented me from loving it as much as everyone else apparently did.
Whenever people would talk about Half-Life, the one phrase that I would see get used the most often would be "environmental storytelling", and for good reason. After a quiet intro sequence where you spend what seems to be just another work day with your fellow scientists explaining the day's tasks to you, the game swiftly takes all of that away and leaves you to find your way out of this mess all on your lonesome. Because of how oppressive the sense of isolation is in this game, the player is able to immediately put two and two together in terms of what they're supposed to do next, as seeing things like corpses piled up beside entrances, a web of connected trip mines, and a destroyed mechanism firing electricity at a pool of water below it not only work in terms of immersing the player in the crumbling Black Mesa Research Facility, but it's also able to communicate both the story and your current objective to you without needing to actually say anything. The combination of highly interactable environments, creepy enemy design, a mostly diegetic soundscape, and a heavy use of scripted events gave the game a sense of unpredictability, and it also made exploration feel dynamic in spite of the game's clear-cut linearity. Gordon Freeman's wide arsenal of weapons made for some fun shootouts while also placing some importance on managing your ammo, and while I pretty much never used weapons like the Hive-hand or the Snark, I still liked how they looked.
Growing up, I had heard nothing but good things about Half-Life, and so I was really shocked to find out just how quickly the game nosedives in quality once it reaches its second half. After a certain point, Half-Life essentially decides to litter each of its remaining levels with traps, enemies, and obstacles that either kill you instantly or overwhelm you until you die, and so you end up abusing the quicksave feature whenever you take more than three steps or kill even one enemy just to spare you from having to deal with any of it a second time. Normally, I don't really mind savescumming if it's in a game where you can come up with your own solutions, but when Half-Life throws a tank that takes loads of ammo to destroy and can one-shot you from a mile away, it feels less like the game is testing the skills that I've acquired throughout my playthrough and more like it's expecting me to repeatedly bash my head against the wall that they've set up until one of its bricks randomly decides to loosen. Fans of this game like to single-out levels like "Xen" as the game's weaker points due to their bad low-gravity platforming (and rightfully so), but I'd argue that "Surface Tension" and everything that comes after it is just one big pile of tedium, and while I wouldn't exactly call any of it hard and the game's other strengths are still present here, this portion of the game is definitely annoying and not at all fun to play through. Half-Life is a very flawed game that didn't exactly age the best, but I still enjoyed it for what it did well, and I hope that Half-Life 2 ends up being a more consistent game than this.
Whenever people would talk about Half-Life, the one phrase that I would see get used the most often would be "environmental storytelling", and for good reason. After a quiet intro sequence where you spend what seems to be just another work day with your fellow scientists explaining the day's tasks to you, the game swiftly takes all of that away and leaves you to find your way out of this mess all on your lonesome. Because of how oppressive the sense of isolation is in this game, the player is able to immediately put two and two together in terms of what they're supposed to do next, as seeing things like corpses piled up beside entrances, a web of connected trip mines, and a destroyed mechanism firing electricity at a pool of water below it not only work in terms of immersing the player in the crumbling Black Mesa Research Facility, but it's also able to communicate both the story and your current objective to you without needing to actually say anything. The combination of highly interactable environments, creepy enemy design, a mostly diegetic soundscape, and a heavy use of scripted events gave the game a sense of unpredictability, and it also made exploration feel dynamic in spite of the game's clear-cut linearity. Gordon Freeman's wide arsenal of weapons made for some fun shootouts while also placing some importance on managing your ammo, and while I pretty much never used weapons like the Hive-hand or the Snark, I still liked how they looked.
Growing up, I had heard nothing but good things about Half-Life, and so I was really shocked to find out just how quickly the game nosedives in quality once it reaches its second half. After a certain point, Half-Life essentially decides to litter each of its remaining levels with traps, enemies, and obstacles that either kill you instantly or overwhelm you until you die, and so you end up abusing the quicksave feature whenever you take more than three steps or kill even one enemy just to spare you from having to deal with any of it a second time. Normally, I don't really mind savescumming if it's in a game where you can come up with your own solutions, but when Half-Life throws a tank that takes loads of ammo to destroy and can one-shot you from a mile away, it feels less like the game is testing the skills that I've acquired throughout my playthrough and more like it's expecting me to repeatedly bash my head against the wall that they've set up until one of its bricks randomly decides to loosen. Fans of this game like to single-out levels like "Xen" as the game's weaker points due to their bad low-gravity platforming (and rightfully so), but I'd argue that "Surface Tension" and everything that comes after it is just one big pile of tedium, and while I wouldn't exactly call any of it hard and the game's other strengths are still present here, this portion of the game is definitely annoying and not at all fun to play through. Half-Life is a very flawed game that didn't exactly age the best, but I still enjoyed it for what it did well, and I hope that Half-Life 2 ends up being a more consistent game than this.