tendo82 said:
Have you ever played a game that you respected but didn't enjoy? What game was it and why?
Half-Life 2. For a video game it had a great story/script/acting matched with amazing facial animation tech. The early levels were a brilliant vision of dystopia, and the later levels had what were perhaps the most cinematic scripted events ever made. I liked all the physics, too.
Unfortunately, the way it actually
played was like a succession of quick time events broken up by simply
awful combat sections. There are a lot of criticisms I could level at the combat but one thing really stood out to me as a problem, and that was the AI (or lack thereof). If what I read on teh interw3b is to be believed then HL2 sports "advanced" AI, but if that's true then why is the only enjoyable/memorable fight in the game the one with the Antlion Queen thing? That thing was as basic and stupid as the opponents in any mindless run-and-gun shooter like Painkiller or Doom 3. It just ran straight at you, then turned, then ran again. The fact that it was ten times more fun to fight than the idiotic combine soldiers doesn't say much for their AI. I'd rather fight the soldiers in FEAR any day.
Then there was the level design. Half-Life 2 tried harder than any other FPS to create the
illusion of choice, where there wasn't really any. At any given time there is one obvious route forward plus a bunch of other directions that it looks like you
could maybe head off in... except when you do (and I did, every time) you quickly find yourself in a dead end. I don't mind corridor shooters that don't try to pretend that they're anything other than a corridor shooter, but HL2 repeatedly taunted me with possible alternative routes only to stop me whenever I tried them and say "sorry, I was only kidding, you can't
really go that way". And as if that wasn't bad enough, every time I did this the gameplay - which was heavily scripted - would come to a shuddering halt. The helicopter chasing my boat would stop and hover in the air over the main route forward and just stay there for as long it took me to check what was at the end of each of the fake alternative paths, or the tripod walker thing would patiently wait for me in the middle of the road, evidently aware that every single door and window on the side-street I'd ducked into was locked, so I'd have to come out sooner or later.
I think Half-Life 2 was designed to be played at break-neck speed by players who will tend to charge straight ahead as long as it's reasonably obvious where "ahead" is (and it is always reasonably obvious in HL2) and I imagine that anyone who played it that way must have had one hell of a ride. But the experience really falls apart for players who are more careful and like to explore their options before deciding what to do. Many of the combat sections could be dealt with quickly by spotting the "clever" thing to do (e.g. shoot the barrels supporting the heavy things over the heads of the enemies) but if you either failed to spot the trick or simply decided not to use it, then the ensuing gunplay was almost always underwhelming.
