Whoever designed the chapter “Lowlife” in Half-Life 2 Episode 1 deserves a good swift kick in the nuts.
Combat overall in HL2E1 seems poorly designed; the designers appear to have not realized that if you make the enemies even tougher than they were in Half-Life 2, and then at the same time give the player fewer weapons with which to fight, it might make for rather frustrating combat sequences. Add to this Lowlife’s trick of there being no goddamn light in the level and it’s just ridiculous. It’s been a long time since I’ve just gotten so fed up with a program that I just Alt-F4’d out, but this game did it.
I’ve said it a lot and I maintain that the best parts of HL2 are the parts that aren’t actually a shooter, where it’s basically a participatory action movie/adventure game.
The squad command stuff is awful.
Welcome to the future! Here’s your flashlight that lasts for 20 seconds.
Come on, Valve. I have a light I have on my keychain that runs for, I dunno, a month. Do you think you might be able to wire the power supply in my Super Suit so that I can see the damn zombies?
Oh, wait. They’re all DESIGNY. The 20 second flashlight is GAME DESIGN.
Right.
*shoots self*
Having finished HL2E1 now, I think it’s a lot closer to a first-person puzzler than a first-person shooter. You’re going to want Alyx to handle most of the shooting, as she is the one who has the “invulnerable” and “infinite ammo” cheats on. You’ll be spending your time pushing stuff around with the gravity gun, crawling through ventilation shafts and pushing more stuff around with the gravity gun.
And it’s clear that the designers broke the first rule of game design and had more fun making the game than I did playing it. Case in point:
Alyx: “Great job taking out that sniper nest! Now I’ll use the sniper rifle to cover you while you run this street filled with obstacles and enemies.”
Me: “Um…since I’m the PLAYER, wouldn’t it be more fun if I got to use the sniper rifle?”
Alyx: “Do you know how much coding that would take?”
Overall, the game was technically excellent, with lots of interesting effects and good reuse of existing content. But from a design perspective, it was pretty weak in my opinion.
And of course, number of questions answered about the Half-Life 2 storyline: ZERO. You don’t even get to find out what was in the transmission.
Glad I’m not the only one that hated that bit. Overall I liked HL2: E1, but that bit was awful. Just awful. Too many enemies, not enough light. I didn’t mind the lack of ammo; killing things with explody barrells is fun, but only in short stints. Especially when you’re waiting for the elevator to arrive, while Zombies and Zombines come from literally no-where and rape you.
I’m not much of a FPS player, but I don’t recall having any problems with hl2ep1.. then again, I don’t recall just about anything about hl2ep1 except for some story elements (like some of the foreshadowing) and the fact that it was pretty short.
Good thing that it had the commentary bits in so you had a reason to run it through a couple of times.
I’m currently literally running through baldur’s gate games *heavily cheating*, and even bg1 is taking far longer than hl2ep1 even though my characters’ stats are maxxed out. (Yes, I know it would probably be more fun without cheating. No, I don’t have the time. And no, I don’t care. Never played them before, just want to see the storyline without having to stop on every level to sleep-heal-sleep-heal for ages. )
Hmm – I hear those are pretty good games … never played any Half-Life myself.
Yeah, you heard right.
Not to derail the direction of the post, but just wanted to respond to sol_hsa…
Instead of “cheating”, try running through with only 1 character. Probably will only work with a caster though (in terms of survival). I’ve been playing a sorcerer in Icewind Dale II, and he’s already 13th level at the start of the second chapter. So he’s much more powerful than the opponents he’s meeting at this point in time.
The way the series does experience is that they divide the combat xp between the number of party members, so naturally having only 1 character means that character levels quite fast. And I dare say that I’m having an easier time than if I brought in a full party of 6. There’s nothing like slaughtering whole groups of opponents with a single fireball, and without worrying about hitting party members as well. And once I was completely surrounded by enemies, so I used my favorite spell Sunburst (basically a fireball that attacks in a 20 foot radius around the caster) to slay them all.
Much cooler than cheating!