To sum it up, I’m disappointed after 5-6 hours with it. It’s great to see and play with all the amazing technology tricks shown in the HL2 promo videos; visuals and atmosphere is sometimes brilliant; the gravity gun is a very original and interesting idea. But! In my experience, it just lacks pace and coherence. It starts great, then drives you nuts with an overly long driving sequence, then the whole thing goes to hell when you are thrown into a messy pit of physics puzzles with zombies and a mad guy jumping around. If you hated Max Payne’s psychotic dream sequences, you’ll probably hate this as well.

If a lesson was contained in HL1, it is that fighting intelligent soldiers in a near-future setting is TONS of fun. Why did they think that a bunch of zombie-like mutants with no AI and a cartoony horror setting were a great idea?

Oh well it can only get better from here. But as far as the "best FPS games ever", my money is still with the likes of Halo, Return to Castle Wolfenstein, Painkiller, Medal of Honor and Doom 3. And, of course, the original Half-Life (minus the alien world).

PS: Load times don’t help either. The menu in particular is infuriating.

Edit: The game seems to improve after the first half is done and you get the bugbait.

Edit II: The second half is definitely much better, up until the end.

Edit III: The retail game includes SecuROM copy protection AND still requires you to activate? That just doesn’t make any sense. I can only guess that nobody at Vivendi were using their brains this year… SecuROM costs money per unit, creates problems for some people with bad/old drives, annoys players by requiring the CD, and in this case does nothing at all to prevent piracy. It’s a loss / loss situation.