achieves the goal of being "baseline fun"--a very lofty ambition that episode 1 trips and faceplants on so hard that i didn't really notice until this one that the overall writing in these episodes feel like fanfics from nerds who want to explain away and worldbuild any sense of ambiguity within a story. i love the mystique of HL2's ending and its parallels with HL1's. it ends at quite literally the perfect moment, but these episodes throw that all in the bin mostly just to answer the baby brain question of "what REALLY happened after the ending of half life 2???? uhhh but I need to see more from gordon freeman!!!"
again--this is an FPS and it hits "baseline fun" so it's not bad per se, but outside of retroactively making the story of HL2 worse when you remember it exists, it puts allll of its cards in on like literally only 1 or 2 moments that come in the last hour, and like 1 halfway through. they're good moments, but the notable bits in this story really only comprise maybe 5 minutes of cutscenes total. which makes it extra weird just how frequently you're asked to stand around and listen to people deliver exposition at you, considering most of it is just there to explain why you have to go over to X area and kill Y enemies or get Z item. it does ultimately culminate in 1 very good scene by the end, but its also a scene that just gets clipped off at the end with the explicit intention of being continued later on (something only implicitly present in HL1 and HL2's ending). and we all know how that went lol.
it's fine. mostly goes down easy. fuck that strider section though.
again--this is an FPS and it hits "baseline fun" so it's not bad per se, but outside of retroactively making the story of HL2 worse when you remember it exists, it puts allll of its cards in on like literally only 1 or 2 moments that come in the last hour, and like 1 halfway through. they're good moments, but the notable bits in this story really only comprise maybe 5 minutes of cutscenes total. which makes it extra weird just how frequently you're asked to stand around and listen to people deliver exposition at you, considering most of it is just there to explain why you have to go over to X area and kill Y enemies or get Z item. it does ultimately culminate in 1 very good scene by the end, but its also a scene that just gets clipped off at the end with the explicit intention of being continued later on (something only implicitly present in HL1 and HL2's ending). and we all know how that went lol.
it's fine. mostly goes down easy. fuck that strider section though.