The game's cutscenes immediately became infamous when the attempts at drama or a dark atmosphere almost immediately fall flat due to the voice acting, the models' appearances or something else entirely caused laughter instead.
- The free demo features a scene in which Mitchell violently interrogates an enemy soldier. What is probably meant to establish Mitchell as a badass and hardened soldier instead comes off as hilarious from his tone of voice trying too hard to be gruff and hamming things up to the point it sounds like he's mispronouncing his words.'WHERE'S GORDUN?! WHERE IS DA FREEMAN?! […] SPEAK, YOU BASTARD!
- Also in the demo, Mitchell is contacted by a squadmate of his who reports the Combine forces suffering heavy losses in a firefight with rebels. Aside from long pauses between the sentences and the overall Dull Surprise delivery, the sound quality is very bad, with the voice actor even breathing into the microphone a couple of times.
- Just before Gordon (actually Adam) knocks Mitchell out, the latter makes his quest for vengeance clear with an incredibly corny and overdramatic line that includes a gratuitous f-bomb:Mitchell: Whatever it takes... Whoever it takes... However long it takes...before I die... I will fucking kill you.
- Basically everything involving Colonel Cue and his Comedy Crew, a bunch of wise-cracking U.S. National Guard that inexplicably feel more like they'd belong in a parody film of war than in an actual life-or-death conflict threatening all of humanity. Bouncing off of the notably more serious Mitchell, Adam and Nick, they seemingly exist solely to add levity to the situation in the most narmy ways humanly possible. And then they all seemingly are Killed Offscreen without anyone even remotely caring.
- Larry's reaction to hearing his mother is dead and frustration at the president's speech come off more as comic relief thanks to his Inopportune Voice Cracking.
- The infamous scene where the President of the United States announces their surrender to the Combine. Going by everyone's reactions, it's clearly meant to be a horrific, heart-breaking scene... but the President is being played by none other than Keemstar, who doesn't put much, if any, emotional gravitas into his brief performance. It sounds less like one of the most powerful men in the world somberly admitting defeat while trying to inspire others to win another day and more like a bored hipster reading lines off a script while trying to stay awake. In addition, his inspiration speech about returning to fight another day completely destroys the very purpose of the surrender in the first place.Tehsnakerer: "...you shouldn't promise revolt in your address of surrender. That might just tick your conquerors off."
- The YouTube personalities' voice acting tends to be this in general. While some of them are trying, it's pretty apparent that they were hired for their clout and not their skills in character acting.
- The most infamous example is the "Black Messah" flub which is spoken by the G-Man twice through the game, taking most of his charm away with the mispronunciations of the same phrase several times over.
- The YouTube personalities' voice acting tends to be this in general. While some of them are trying, it's pretty apparent that they were hired for their clout and not their skills in character acting.
- "Boston" Joe shows up to tell Mitchell to not use his weapons because of a gas leak that could kill them both if handled recklessly. Then he proceeds to whip out a shotgun as they are able to use guns just fine, clarifying it was a different room that had the gas leak, to Mitchell's incredulous response. And also calls headcrabs spiders with huge vaginas. Like Colonel Cue's team, Joe just seemingly exists to fit in another burst of comedy in Act 1 and is completely out of tone with the intentions of the story, enough so that he disappears not long after.
- At the start of the train defense sequence, some random soldier's corpse with a minigun warps in out of nowhere to give the player a weapon they need to hold off Combine Gunships for the next ten minutes. It's like the kind of thing you'd see in Garry's Mod.
- After the final holdout sequence at the end of the first arc, part of the ship suddenly explodes, and then Captain Roosevelt's upper torso conveniently falls in front of the soldiers. For some reason, Roosevelt still manages to spew out his corny last words, despite having just been blown in half. The absurdity of the whole situation makes it hilarious.
- The entire subplot of "Mitchell's curse" that seems to kill whoever is in command conveniently for Mitchell to take over might've been an interesting idea — had Nick not suddenly blurted it out in the middle of a normal conversation to declare without any prior sign that he held resentment or paranoia over it, and Roosevelt's dramatic last worlds in an already-narmy scene proclaiming it to not be a curse, but a Deal with the Devil. Afterwards, Nick promptly agrees to put Mitchell himself in charge of the ship without breaking a sweat, rendering the whole Conflict Ball almost entirely pointless.
- During an otherwise heartfelt conversation with Boris
, during which Boris expresses disgust at being forced to work for the Combine, Mitchell tells him not to be disgusted, then suddenly goes into a confusing tirade about natural balance, how the humans could have enslaved the aliens but enslaved other humans instead and thus couldn't care less about aliens, the dynamic between predator and prey, how the tables have turned against humans, then for some reason, jumps to warning Boris to enjoy his time while he can before humankind rises again and gets killed by the Combine along with him. The content of the speech aside, Mitchell delivers the monologue without a single pause, as if he'd rehearsed it a thousand times before and just performed it to a stranger for no reason. - It's hard to not chuckle when looking at Nick after the second timeskip. In comparison to the bizarre but still passable National Guard model he had during the Seven Hour War, here, he looks like a lizard with such skin and baldness, having suddenly aged much more than he should have after 20 years.
- At one point, Sasha calls Mitchell a hero for rescuing children fron the Combine factory in New Alaska. What comes out of Mitchell's mouth next comes off as unintentionally dramatic, if not outright hilarious.
- The revelation that everything in the game, all of what Mitchell survived through, all of the death that followed him, and even his attempts to be a Villain Protagonist, were all some part of a grand master plan of the G-Man taking Mitchell's dramatic threat to heart, and consistently paving the path for him to butt his head into Half-Life 2's story... to be one gigantic distraction so Freeman has an easier time getting to the Citadel after the rebellion has begun. Not even to fulfill the threat itself despite the claims of the G-Man at the start of the game, he just murdered Mitchell's commanding officers repeatedly to let him take control and build up his forces for 20 years solely for this purpose. It's around this point that the game then shows Adam was the one in the H.E.V. Suit that brutalized Mitchell at the beginning of the game, seemingly to incite Mitchell to be so vengeful that he'd utter his death threat, as if for no reason whatsoever the G-Man was also now a Jerkass Genie that needs a clause and claim to do this entire plot.
- In said scene of Adam's reveal as being the one who assaulted Mitchell in the prologue, he turns his head at a ridiculous angle and gives a smug grin to the screen, which all but screams "Haha I was impersonating Gordon all along, suckers!"
- Also from the same scene we get to see the prologue flashback of Mitchell getting beaten up - then for some reason it repeats backwards before finally being shown the third time, from Adam's perspective. Such cutscene play is not only confusing, but also quite ridiculous.
- Before speaking out the truth, the G-Man tells Mitchell that he's "done a great deal in a small time". The line falls flat on its face not just because Mitchell had spent a whopping twenty years harboring the grudge towards Freeman, but also because Mitchell hadn't really accomplished anything himself besides teaming up with the Combine for one raid operation, making his way to Nova Prospekt and then getting captured by rebels.
- The additional kicker to the twist is that Adam's Frame-Up to make it look like Gordon did it is actually not given an explanation or context. It's never laid out why he was in the suit, why he murdered Mitchell's squad pretending to be Freeman, or why he went out of his way to let any of this happen before serving as G-Man's personal watcher over the plot playing out, never mind Adam's seeming motivations for taking everything Mitchell built up at the end and leaving him to die. All you get is that "they had a deal." So Mitchell's entire story hinges on assuming the G-Man even wanted him in the first place, and otherwise becomes so intent on one of the most obscene Complexity Addiction cases in gaming over a single death threat that nothing makes sense anymore.
- As if to top off the utter nuclear bomb of narm this entire sequence entails, the G-Man then proceeds to quote The Dark Knight Rises as a dramatic one-liner — which Mitchell then steals for the scene below.
- The ending. Mitchell chases Adam down across the ship in an extremely laughable manner and proceeds to shoot him in the knee. Despite the wound, Adam manages to stand up. Then Mitchell pins him against a rail and shoots him multiple times, punctuating each one with another reason for hating him, culminating in the infamous "you fucked up my face" line and a cheesy "And now... you have my permission to die" before delivering the coup-de-grace in the form of a headshot that sends Adam tumbling into the ocean. The scene already reads like something from an edgy fan animation, but then factor in the fact that Mitchell's voice actor is trying way too hard to sound like a grizzled badass and Adam's voice actor plays being shot in the knee and then in the stomach four times with a Hand Cannon the same way you might sound when you stub your toe, only managing a pathetic and vaguely sexual groan after each shot (especially after the fourth, where he sounds flat out aroused) and still claiming that he can explain despite having four bullets in his stomach and one in the knee. Add in uncanny model animations stolen from Left 4 Dead and overly dramatic music, and it's impossible to take the scene seriously.
