Oh for Christ's sake. We have this thread EVERY DAMN WEEK.
Oh, well. Best make my rant, before everyone starts going LOL HALO.
Actually, on that note, Halo is slightly overrated. I love it, I think it's great and excellent fun, but it hardly deserves perfect 10s. 9.0 is more like it.
More overrated, though, is - yes, Zhukov, you guessed it - Half-Life 2. I got the chance to play through up until the conclusion of Ravenholm (then I had to stop, indefinitely) and it wasn't what everyone said it was. I'm not saying it was bad, because really, it isn't. It's just not particularly brilliant, either. I liked the passive storytelling. I liked how terrified Ravenholm made you (well... no, I didn't, because I'm a wuss, but you get my point). Hell, I even liked the physics puzzles, because they kept you thinking and provided nice little mental challenges.
I didn't, on the other hand, like the incredibly linear combat. Maybe this is just because of my experience with Halo, but I really noticed when there was only one way you could get past something. Example: the first machine gun post, on Route Kanal. Precisely the only way to take it out was to run into a little pipe, follow it until you reach a ladder, then ascend it and take out the machine gunner from behind with a swift downstroke of the crowbar. In Halo, meanwhile, the level design is generally less linear and there are always several ways to get past the enemies - I don't think I've died the same way twice after respawning from a checkpoint, and there are notable levels where I use a different strategy each time based on what I carried with me through the level and what is close at hand. I think this is the better style of game design, myself - tell me, people-older-than-my-youthful-self, was this the thing Halo: CE did differently to everyone else, or were lots of shooters like that? If so, I should probably play more retro shooters...
Another thing I didn't like was the airboat section. The bloody airboat section was awful on my Xbox (yes, I know, not on PC, doing it wrong, etc. etc.). The controls couldn't decide whether to be inverted or not. Let me present you with a common sequence of actions in my Airboat:
I'd be standing (well, floating) stock still on a pool of surprisingly good-looking water.
I would press the stick left, in an attempt to, y'know, go left.
I would go right.
Figuring the controls were inverted, I pressed the stick right, expecting to go left, as logic would dictate.
Guess what? I'd continue to go right.
This was naturally even more annoying when trying to dodge incoming powerful attacks from a hunter-chopper.
I should also bring up the small variety in the enemies, which is only as minor complaint, but one that stands nonetheless. Route Kanal and Water Hazard had me up against Metrocops with pistols damn near all the time. It occasionally spiced it up with a few Manhacks (btw, a giant snake of Manhacks stuck together on Garrys Mod is one of the funniest things you'll ever see or hear) and the odd headcrab zombie (and really, Barnacles were more obstacles than enemies). In the end, it got a little boring, just blasting my way through endless grey-armoured gas-masked mooks. That's probably why they included the Airboat, but surely there's a better way of making the game less repetitive than that.
Let me clarify this once again: These things do not make Half-Life 2 a bad game. What they do is confine it to "high-end-of-average". I've heard people proclaim it as the best thing since written word, but I still prefer Halo. And if anyone says "it gets better later", I will eat their faces off. That is not a valid argument as to why a game is the best game in the world - the best game ever made should not take half of its levels to get going properly.
