Half-Life 1 Ranking: D
If you read my AMA, you knew this was coming. There are legions of fans all over the Internet praising this game left and right for its innovative approach to telling a story in an FPS setting. I'll concede that point, but I'll also say that an FPS is mostly about gameplay and immersion, not about story. The gameplay in this game is pretty atrocious, because a lot of it involves jumping puzzles.
Jumping puzzles, with rare exception, DO NOT WORK in an FPS. They don't. They. DON'T. If you make a jump in real life, you have a bunch of senses other than sight helping you land where you want to land. In an FPS, you've got limited sight and none of the other senses. Now I was going to give this game a pass, since it came out early on and maybe the developers simply didn't get this as they were breaking new ground in the FPS genre. But then I read that the sequel also has jumping puzzles, so they clearly didn't learn their lesson.
A second flaw is the "realism" of the game. You fight a branch of the military at several points and they'll set up ambushes or minefields in which you don't see either of them coming. You need to navigate a minefield completely blind, which is realistic, but let's consider the fact that a theoretical physicist with little to no combat training fighting hordes of aliens and the military, in reality, is going to get his bullet-ridden ass handed to him in approximately 12 seconds. You pretty much need to abuse save/load to get through this game, which isn't fun at all.
And what the flaming hell was up with losing all your equipment halfway through the game? That served exactly no purpose at all except to piss the player off. Really? The soldiers set up an ambush, like all the other ambushes Freeman had no trouble getting through, but this time they turned off the lights! Gasp! So much for realism and storytelling.
Yeah, I'm not playing the sequel or the sequel to the sequel.
If you read my AMA, you knew this was coming. There are legions of fans all over the Internet praising this game left and right for its innovative approach to telling a story in an FPS setting. I'll concede that point, but I'll also say that an FPS is mostly about gameplay and immersion, not about story. The gameplay in this game is pretty atrocious, because a lot of it involves jumping puzzles.
Jumping puzzles, with rare exception, DO NOT WORK in an FPS. They don't. They. DON'T. If you make a jump in real life, you have a bunch of senses other than sight helping you land where you want to land. In an FPS, you've got limited sight and none of the other senses. Now I was going to give this game a pass, since it came out early on and maybe the developers simply didn't get this as they were breaking new ground in the FPS genre. But then I read that the sequel also has jumping puzzles, so they clearly didn't learn their lesson.
A second flaw is the "realism" of the game. You fight a branch of the military at several points and they'll set up ambushes or minefields in which you don't see either of them coming. You need to navigate a minefield completely blind, which is realistic, but let's consider the fact that a theoretical physicist with little to no combat training fighting hordes of aliens and the military, in reality, is going to get his bullet-ridden ass handed to him in approximately 12 seconds. You pretty much need to abuse save/load to get through this game, which isn't fun at all.
And what the flaming hell was up with losing all your equipment halfway through the game? That served exactly no purpose at all except to piss the player off. Really? The soldiers set up an ambush, like all the other ambushes Freeman had no trouble getting through, but this time they turned off the lights! Gasp! So much for realism and storytelling.
Yeah, I'm not playing the sequel or the sequel to the sequel.