While there was one puzzle at the end of the game that's solution was kind of annoying, the rest of Blue Shift is one of the most consistently good parts of any of the gold source HL games. This might have been recency bias since this was the last gold source HL game I played, but I liked pretty much every aspect touched in Blue Shift more than I did in opposing force. The new additions and features in the game that made it stand out from the original, while having far fewer than OF, utilized it's new features a lot more than OF as the more grounded nature of Calhoun made me really think I was an actual security guard escaping the madness of the black mesa incident, more than Shepard in OF which just seemed like a less powerful Gordan Freeman. I also liked the atmosphere a lot more, as playing through the earlier stages and seeing more of Black Mesa, and then having to run around for the first few minutes after the incident played a lot into the horror aspects of the game which I really appreciated. Overall while both OF and BS are good games to play after beating HL1, I would strongly recommend BS over OF, as I simply just liked it more as an experience.

Huge disappointment. I was prepared to defend this, but nope. I liked this even less than Opposing Force. Barney is my favourite character from the HL2 games, so this was very sad.

Blue Shift simply has nothing going for it. The story's fine, and honestly it has a lot of potential (being a security guard during a containment breach in a top-secret research facility has certainly been the impetus for some awesome stories in the SCP universe), but the game is too short to take advantage of it. Halfway through, I got the sense that I might be evacuating people, unlike Freeman and Shephard who take a more direct approach to the alien incursion, but Barney only really saves a handful of people. There's little to differentiate the plot from that of the other two games. You get the guns, you shoot the military and the aliens, and you do what you can to get out.

Additionally, the gameplay kinda sucks. It has all the same problems that the other games do with the clunky controls but not enough cool combat encounters to compensate for them. There aren't even any new weapons. You get the missile launcher towards the end, but I didn't use it once because you simply don't need to. It's not even as if there are any interesting puzzles, either; just some annoying platforming sections that would fare much better in a game with smoother movement.

Half-Life: Blue Shift feels like nothing more than a tacked-on epilogue to Half-Life and Opposing Force. Hardly anything about it stands out (except for the brief trip to Xen), it's not fun to play, and the atmosphere is a step down from the other games. It's only worth playing through for the sake of getting Barney's side of the story (which isn't even referenced in the later games as far as I'm aware) and because it's so short.

More like "Project I'm Going to slaughter everyone like pigs"

It's impressive for its big open maps and realistic physics. But (and maybe it's just me sucking at stealth games) the stealth mechanics here are kinda unhinged. Most of the times enemies can't see you like 20 meters away, other times they spot you like 50 meters away. Some enemy camps have no alternative entry ways, so you're almost forced to break through the main gate with guns blazing. Most stealth games give you mechanics or pathways that let you avoid combat, but not here. Every single mission I tried to play stealthily, I'd end up just shooting everybody.

In fact, sometimes it feels almost like the game encourages you to do that, giving you packs of grenades or close-range weapons like SPAS 12 shotgun. Yet at the same time you die very quick. So the whole game ends up being just a needlessly difficult Delta Force clone instead of a stealth game.

There are no saves or checkpoints during missions, so if you fail, you have to start all over again. And like I can respect a commitment to realism, but how realistic is a game where you can shoot a guy without a silencer about 20 meters away from another guy and he doesn't even notice?