The problem is that the heavier weapons like the combine rifle are only introduced in the later part of the game from what I remember (I think I stopped somewhere around the antlions last time), where as it seemed like the first half was limited to the crappy weapons, interspersed with some magnum revolver ammo as a treat. By the time I would get access to the good weapons, I’d usually have already lost my enthusiasm to continue. If I had connected more with the story I could look past all that, but since that part just wasn’t engaging with me, the combat needed to carry the experience, which it just wasn’t able to do in my particular case.
I didn’t use the gravity gun as much as standard weapons since most of the objects available to shoot with it are usually quite large which obscured the view of the target (not a problem close up, but mid range and farther I’d have trouble with it), and I found it really janky to use in tighter spaces like hallways or smaller rooms, where the object being held would get caught up on the terrain or doorways.
handrails would also deflect objects shot with it, and a lot of the times when ambushed with a combat encounter, I wasn’t scanning the area for objects to pick up while being shot at, I would just engage immediately and return fire.
It’s a cool gadget, and perhaps others got past the issues I had with using it effectively, but overall I preferred just using a standard weapon, and in that realm the ones that were fun to use had little ammo, leaving me with the very weak pistol and smg, which I didn’t find terribly fun.
As I said, there was never enough ammo to really use the revolver more than a few times in my experience, hence why I cheated infinite ammo for it.
I don’t have any nostalgia for the half life games as I didn’t play them growing up, but I also don’t think their age is really a contributing factor. Personally I found Half Life 1’s combat to actually be far more fun due to the enemies feeling a little less sponge-y, and the gunplay/guns themselves feeling more punchy and overall just better to me. HL2 I consider a step down.
There are shooters older than HL2 that I would consider to have much better combat, like Blood (1998) or Return to Castle Wolfenstein (2001) despite their age. I understand that HL2 was trying quite number of new things, but ultimately my gripes with the combat are mostly down to what I consider to be a poor choice of damage variables, but that’s just in regards to my own preferences for combat in games.
From what I recall, I didn’t really enjoy using the gravity gun all that much since bigger objects had a tendency to clip terrain if they weren’t aimed quite right, and thus miss the enemy I was aiming at, which prompted me to switch back to the other weapons to finish off a gunfight. Admittedly that might’ve been just a me problem, and others had more success using it (I know the sawblades with the gravity gun were quite accurate and easy to use in ravenholm, but I don’t think they show up much after that area).
I felt like most of the game doesn’t really give you enough ammo with the non-standard weapons to really use them outside of one or two bigger fights, then I’d be back down to the smg, pistol, or shotgun (which I also felt was a little under powered unless you used the alt fire, but that chewed through ammo too quickly to be viable most of the time).
As someone who hates open-world ubisoft style games, I’m nevertheless not much of a fan of HL2 either. I tried it multiple times at different points in my life and each time found it to feel like a slog that I end up giving up on a few hours in.
I enjoyed the 1984 aspects of the world at first, but I ultimately can’t get past how bullet spongy enemies are. Virtually every weapon feels extremely impotent except the revolver, which has very limited ammo. I began to dread every encounter with enemies because it rarely felt fun to fight them.
On my last playthrough I cheated and gave myself infinite revolver ammo, which helped me get farther than before, but even then I was struggling to push onward after a certain point, just because it felt like endless waves of enemies being thrown at me with some mildly enjoyable physics puzzles tossed in between them.
Never felt a connection with any of the characters, and without that the gameplay itself just becomes repetitive to me.
The reviewer concludes it’s not a good sequel, didn’t enjoy most of their time in it. It’s a fairly okay detective game wrapped up in crappy action-brawler combat and a pretty lame open-world.
I assembled a rather large list of free Linux games a few years ago, and most of them are low-spec friendly. Hopefully you find something interesting from it :)
Tyranny (a different RPG by obsidian) puts you in the role of a fairly high ranking judge working for a brutal expanding empire. You have the option to play a really nasty person if you wish. Not terribly funny though, usually quite a serious vibe.
If you’ve been holding off on Cyberpunk 2077, it’s in a really solid state nowadays, and has a pretty dang good main story with lots of roleplaying options, and plays well with a controller.
Terra Nil is a cool relaxing solarpunk strategy/builder game about restoring the environment. Not sure how complete controller support is, but its rated playable for the steam deck (could be hit or miss).
The Mass Effect series supports controller, and they’re pretty fun sci-fi RPG’s with good characters.
Disco Elysium is a more text heavy RPG. I personally bounced off it due to its theme, but it’s pretty unique, worth a shot if you click with it.
I thought its discussion of how much Civilization focuses on conquest, colonization, and combat over most other systems, to the point of it becoming a bit ridiculous if you try to go pacifist, was interesting. The year it was written didn’t seem a detriment.
There’s a pretty massive item market for this game to use real money for in-game items, where the seller will meet you in a match and drop the gear. So there’s a big financial incentive for people from third world countries to hack so they can quickly acquire valuable items to sell on that market.
The cheating problem is off the charts. There was a really good video of someone who investigated how bad it was, and found that about 50% of players were using wallhacks. of matches will have a hacker.
I played it for a couple months. The gunplay was pretty impressive, but the cheaters made it incredibly frustrating, and after seeing that video, I uninstalled and never looked back.
It’s mostly underwhelming, IMHO. Pick it up on sale only, if you can. And make sure you have at least 8gb of vram, or it’ll cease working after you get to Italy.