There's a part early on in Half-Life 2, right as you're running away from the Combine into the outskirts of the city, if memory serves, where the chase just suddenly stops as Gordon is faced with an impassable object: a ledge slightly too high to jump on next to a seesaw and a bunch of blocks to put on one of its ends to weigh it down and use it as a bridge. I presume the intended reaction was to be mind-blown that this kind of physics interaction was possible in a videogame. Today, it feels the same way it would if it asked you to play a quick round of Tetris instead.

HL2... I don't want to say it's "aged poorly", the design of actual combat is mostly fine and it's not from an era where the basic workings of FPS games were still being figured out, so it cannot use age as an excuse for its core flaws anyways. But it's trying really hard to flex its (admittedly insane for the time) engine that it really doesn't feel like an actual FPS half of the time.

The airboat section sucks, it lasts forever and doesn't feel good to control, the car section is almost as bad, all of the "Boss fights" in the game are shooting things with your rocket launcher next to a box of infinite ammo, which is really dull, and the antlion chapter is actively bad.

That's not to say that there aren't good set-pieces, the final stretch is overall great and I adore Ravenholm, but HL2 just doesn't feel like it has a cohesive vision, it's a bunch of often middling ideas thrown together and that might hold up better, if it weren't for the fact that the gunplay just doesn't feel as good as HL1. Even discarding the fact that you're a lot slower now, a lot of the guns feel somewhat weak, human enemies are spongier than in the first game, and somehow the Combine's AI feels worse than the much older original game's HECU, which is particularly bad because unlike HL1 human-like enemies are what you will be fighting for like 80% of the game, which is both less interesting, at least to me, and just less mechanically sound than most combat in the first game.

This is something I only learned to put into words by the time I played HL2E2 but man do I not like these games' writing- the thoughtless accusations of "MCU writing" every vaguely comedic form of media has to face these days quite frankly fit it to a T. This is a dystopian setting, but everyone is so... cheery, almost self-aware and so, so, so in love with Mr. Freeman (Who is now treated as if he were a real character despite still having absolutely no personality or characteristics of his own beyond his superhuman penchant for mass slaughter) that it just all feels very fake for me.

Anyways, uh, at least it led to Portal coming out. Portal is pretty cool.

Here's something else I just realized: In a lot of fields HL2 just does what HL1 did because HL1 did it, without understanding why it did it. Half-Life 1 has almost no info-dumps besides the intro- it chooses to have a narrative that is (nearly) unbroken by cutscenes because it understands its own story is a great fit for that. Half-Life 2 wants to have a cinematic story, but still tries to abide by the "no cutscenes" rule, so it just ends up trading a 5-minute cutscene of people talking for a 5-minute scene of people talking with none of the advantages and all the disadvantages of a proper cutscene.