YMMV / Half-Life 2

• Adorkable:
  • Alyx. Some of her expressions fall into this, thanks to the Source engine's somewhat realistic face rendering. If you need further proof, see how she goes about coining the term "Zombine" in Episode One.
    "Hmmm. A Combine zombie. That's, that's like a... a... Zombine! Right? Heh... Zombine, get it? Heh heh. Okay."
  • Dr. Kleiner. There's just something so endearing about a quiet, timid old man who coos over a headcrab as if it were a sweet little kitten.
• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • It's not hard to interpret Breen's actions in a different light. Is he really doing all of this for humanity's sake? Or is he just siding with the Combine for power (given his little slip of the tongue in "Dark Energy", where he uses the term "The Combine" rather than "Our Benefactors", which he stresses the citizens to use because "The Combine" is like a derogatory term)?
  • In Episode Two, Alyx's "Great driving, Gordon!" line sounds really sarcastic if you're the kind of player who's already crashed twice.
  • The "Pick up that can" Metro Cop. Is he a bully exercising his power over people or is he a Punch-Clock Villain just doing it out of boredom? If you defy him, he won't put much effort into punishing you, just whacking you one time and leaving. Others would have chased and beaten you up.
• Annoying Video Game Helper:
  • "Don't forget to reload!" is one of the more useless pieces of advice you can receive from your rebel followers, and they'll tell you this even if you're in the process of reloading, still have half a magazine left, or are using a weapon that doesn't even have a manual reload option. This is thankfully absent from the Episodes.
  • Intentionally averted in Episode One with Alyx. Originally, she was to frequently tell Gordon (and thus the player) to hurry up/go faster/something similar, but when the developers realized that if players didn't like Alyx they wouldn't like the game, as she spends almost all of the game following the player, this was removed.
• Ass Pull:
  • Gordon Freeman being portrayed as some sort of heroic figure that returns to lead the resistance is viewed as this by some people since it brings to question how Gordon ended up with such a high reputation amongst the people to begin with. It was only the employees of Black Mesa and the Vortigaunts who knew of what he accomplished in the original Half-Life. One could suggest however that it’s a result of the Black Mesa survivors and Vortigaunts spreading his name for saving them combined with the military survivors spreading his name as the ultimate demon to them, only to then join the Combine later, making everyone side with the mythical man who slaughtered hundreds of murderous soldiers.
  • The entire existence of the Combine could be considered this as well, since there was no proper reference to them in the first game.
• Awesome Music: As seen here.
• Base-Breaking Character: Dr. Magnusson in Episode Two. While initially loved for his irascible personality in contrast to the friendly company of the Vances and Dr. Kleiner, the years since the release of the game have seen fan reception of Magnusson grow colder. Now the base is split between the ones who still see Magnusson as a refreshing dose of vitriol in contrast to the rest of the cast and those who see him as a one-note Jerkass more befitting of Portal than Half-Life. There's also the issue that he's yet another Black Mesa survivor in eastern Europe, seemingly just for the sake of a Brick Joke regarding an Easter Egg from the first game.
• Best Level Ever:
  • The airboat chase in "Water Hazard" is remarkably fun.
  • "Highway 17" has the bridge, the most wonderfully atmospheric part of the game. It's beautiful and gives a very intense sensation of being there. Being above the ocean while the wind rushes in your ears, as you barely climb your way over the broken up sections of metal under the bridge, while very quiet atmospheric music plays... Then, once the fighting starts, it becomes straight badass, especially when a gunship is added into the mix. The surrounding overcast when you're driving alongside the ocean is quite awesome too.
  • Nova Prospekt, including the exterior that leads up to the chapter of the same name. Gordon has an army of antlions at his command for Storming the Beaches. The Combine garrison falls bunker by bunker and you can hear overhear the radio chatter talking about their defenses failing. Gordon then infiltrates the prison yard and the tower defenses fall to the antlion hordes. Twin gunships are called in to defend the yard, but Gordon is able to take them down. After killing the gunships, Gordon enters the prison. Inside the prison, Gordon continues his assault with the antlion army and the Combine desperately try to slow him down. There's an increase in SMG grenades and energy balls that are helpful for crowds so feel free to give the Combine hell.
  • "Anticitizen One" and "Follow Freeman" have Gordon going through City 17 in the midst of the uprising, fighting alongside rebels and crushing the Combine along the way through intense fighting. Video Game Caring Potential kicks in when trying to protect your squad of rebels.
  • In the Citadel, once your gravity gun gets upgraded. At first it serves as an Oh, Crap! moment as almost all your weapons get taken away. The gravity gun, which up until now has been unable to directly damage anything larger than a headcrab, is now your only weapon. Then you find out that it's been powered up, and can now kill human-sized enemies in a single hit. You can rip computer consoles off the wall, and the environment provides you with an unlimited supply of energy balls. You know, the same energy balls that the Pulse Rifle fires as its secondary fire, deal ridiculous collateral damage, and are only given in small handfuls? Then you find out that the wall chargers, which at best would fill your suit power to 75%, now not only fill you all the way, but boost your suit power to 200% and heal you as well. You are now an unstoppable force, able to take out enemy soldiers effortlessly, and deal with former boss enemies with almost no trouble at all.
• Broke the Rating Scale: Maximum PC magazine, which was mainly a hardware publication, devoted a five-page cover story just to its Half-Life 2 review when it came out, rating the game 11/10.
• Broken Base: Whether it was a Nerf or not that Combine Shotgun Soldiers getting updated with their own unique character skin by Episode Two. Some will say that it allows for better differentiation between the soldiers to kill off the more lethal enemies (the shotgunners) first. Others don't feel much of a difference.
• Common Knowledge:
  • Fanon often calls the Combine "the Universal Union" and treats the term "Combine" as derogatory. Dr. Breen only used the term "universal union" in one speech and Marc Laidlaw was baffled that the community adopted the term as the official title. In-game the Combine is only ever officially referred to as the Combine or CMB abbreviated.
  • Many people mistakenly believe that 2003 Content Leak caused Valve to delay the game and cut many of the early concepts like Darker and Edgier setting. In reality, pretty much everything attributed to what is commonly recognized as "old Half-Life 2 story" (darker City 17, Air Exchange, Borealis) was already scrapped long before the leak happened and what can be seen in the actual leaked build is highly reminiscent of the final game. The delay was also announced shortly before the leak went public and the reasoning for that is obvious as even a brief look at the leaked build shows that the game was nowhere near ready to ship in September 2003.
  • Due to how much the Cinematic Mod focuses on making Alyx in particular a Ms. Fanservice, critics of the mod act like only her character model has fully-modeled genitalia. In reality, every new female character model has naughty bits, and it's a side effect of the mod using models that aren't meant for video games in the first place rather than trying to make Half-Life 2 Hotter and Sexier.
• Complete Monster: Dr. Wallace Breen, once administrator of Black Mesa, rises to govern humanity after offering his services to the alien Combine. After "saving" Earth, Breen ensures his own power and position is secure. Running a horrifically despotic regime with executions and brutality the norm, Breen intends to cause the end of humankind by halting their reproduction. Trying to stamp out and kill any embers of rebellion by killing or torturing every member of the resistance, Breen attempts to flee the Earth when Gordon Freeman comes for him, attempting to blow his citadel to nothing to kill Freeman and allow the Combine to raze Earth while he joins them in a new body.
• Contested Sequel: People are very divided over the quality of the games. While none of them are bad per se, which of the games is the best is very controversial.
  • No one is out to describe Half-Life 2 as being anything less than a groundbreaking piece of software that pushed the gaming medium forward in ways that are still felt to this day, but whether or not it's as fun as the first game on a pure design level is hotly debated. The much slower pace, more subdued and ethereal atmosphere, worse-feeling guns, emphasis on physics puzzles/the gravity gun and being far easier than the first game are often areas of debate on this topic. This might be due to many recent players coming to try out Half-Life 2 and encountering many instances of the Once Original, Now Common situation which brings to light the game's shortcomings. After all, it's hard to be wowed by things like the physics system and advanced facial animation features when those have become bog-standard features of every AAA game on the planet, which makes the game's negatives like the poor gunplay and aforementioned slow pace stick out more.
  • The Episodes are considered by many to be better than the main game, due to their better level design, varied environments and new gameplay additions. For Episode One however, it turned out to have much less content then Half-Life 2, bringing nothing new to the franchise, and only lasted a short five chapters in length (with some levels spanning as low as just two overall loading-maps). Unlike Episode Two which was at least shipped along with Team Fortress 2 and Portal in the Orange Box, Episode One was a single game that was basically considered to be an overpriced DLC.
• Demonic Spiders:
  • Combine Shotgunners are one of the nastiest enemies in the games, frequent enough once the Combine Soldiers start appearing to tangle up your fights yet delicate enough to be a Glass Cannon. Statistically they're like any other soldier, except they charge straight in for you and begin blasting away with the shotgun as their name inclines, and do it surprisingly rapidly. On the Hard difficulty, one Shotgunner can kill you in seconds by destroying your suit energy and shredding through your health like a hot knife through butter - so naturally, the game starts liberally throwing them into almost every other soldier encounter. Notably, Episode Two and the 'New Engine' update acknowledges their status by giving shotgun-wielding Combine a distinct skin with red eyes, making them easier to spot in a group.
  • Poison Headcrabs have particularly distinct sounds, which are essentially your main and only warning that they're about to put your HP to One. Doesn't matter how much suit energy you have or if you're at max health, one bite saps nearly every ounce of health so that other enemies can finish you off. They're not too frequent and are only marginally tougher than normal headcrabs, but the moment the little bastard's presence is apparent, Valve themselves admitted that playtesters flew into a panic, wasted excess ammo and precious explosives, and ignored every other threat in the area just to make sure these things were dead. This is essentially the only reason the Poison Headcrab Zombies are even a threat, as they accurately pitch up to three Poison Headcrabs in active attack states right at your face, and one of them dying means potentially multiple of the damn things are now active from dropping off the corpse if there were any left.
  • Episode One and Episode Two have the Combine Overwatch Zombie, otherwise known as the Zombine. At first, it doesn't seem so bad, just a regular zombie with twice as much health. But then you realize that they can sprint, do more damage per hit, and most importantly, can whip out a grenade and suicide bomb you if you don't do enough damage right away. That attack is nearly always a One-Hit Kill, and whenever you encounter a group of zombies at least one Zombine will use it, pulling out a grenade and sprinting at you. On the other hand, holding a grenade prevents them from sprinting, meaning if you're careful not to knock it out of their hand, and exploit the zombies' movements, you can use them against the horde, taking out a dozen zombies without ever firing a shot.
  • Hunters, exclusive to Episode Two. They're a prime Lightning Bruiser archetype: able to take a full clip of double shotgun shots, incredibly agile and able to tackle you, and their flechettes deal sizeable damage in addition to being hard as hell to dodge. Valve gave them specific weaknesses to try and mitigate this, but they're all unreliable to use. The Pulse Rifle's energy balls kill them in one hit, but you only get five or so through the entirety of Episode Two; physics objects deal extra damage to them and more if they have flechettes in them, but you won't always have one on hand, especially during the White Forest defense segment; and your car can run them over, but steering it is hard on uneven terrain and they'll sidestep you to avoid getting hit.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Father Grigori. Appears in one level, yet is one of the most popular characters. Helps that he shares a voice with Bill, that being the late Jim French.
  • "Male_07", one of the generic Citizens/Rebel models, has a noteworthy following thanks to being the de-facto default protagonist for many of Half-Life 2's derivative works, including Concerned, Half-Life: Full Life Consequences, and the mod version of The Stanley Parable.
• Even Better Sequel: Half-Life was seen as one of the best games of all time for its strides in storytelling and Worldbuilding, along with having fast, challenging gameplay. Half-Life 2 is seen as even more of a step forward in game design, art direction, facial animation, and general presentation.
• Fan-Preferred Cut Content: The game was envisioned as being far more dystopian during its early production, with the Combine's oppression and ravaging of the Earth made much more apparent. There was also a larger roster of enemies, including a few familiar creatures from the first game, as well as a bigger arsenal of weapons. The original approach to the atmosphere was scrapped in favor of something more toned down and believably oppressive, while many enemies and weapons were cut due to redundancy, technical issues, or simply not being conductive to good gameplay. However, a sizeable part of the fan base actually prefers the original vision, so much so that there are entire communities dedicated to documenting the game's cut content and creating total-conversion game mods to restore the original storyline and atmosphere, such as Missing Information, Dark Interval, and Raising The Bar: Redux.
• Game-Breaker:
  • Machine gun turrets, while under control of the player, can be picked up with the gravity gun and use as an infinite machine gun, no real aiming required. They're only available in "Entanglement", but use them well and the enemies get mowed down by the dozens.
  • A grav-gunnable physics object resembling a boat hook which can be found on the beach during the "Sand Traps" chapter is this, both literally and figuratively. Literally because, at certain points, it can either crash the game or render further progress impossible, and figuratively because, when fired at any organic enemy, up to and including Antlion Bosses, it's a guaranteed one hit kill. The harpoon found in the Lost Coast expansion behaves identically.
  • For a more conventional example, the Shotgun. It seems just like the shotgun from the original game at first, but it is also ungodly powerful. Ammo for it is everywhere, it will kill most enemies in one hit, it has surprisingly good accuracy, and it reloads surprisingly fast. Once you get it, there's no real reason to use anything else.
• Genius Bonus:
  • The cat that Kleiner apparently tested the teleporter on is a reference to The Fly (1958), which also featured an ill-fated cat being used to test a teleporter. Barney even claims that the "damn thing" haunts him.
  • If you know your Greek Mythology, it's fairly obvious that the Vortigaunts' portrayal in this game is based on the classic portrayal of the Cyclops. Outside The Odyssey, most classical Greek writers like Hesiod described Cyclops as wise master craftsmen with control over electricity (they were said to be the crafters of Zeus's thunderbolts), in addition to being one-eyed giants.
  • One Breencast after the escape from Nova Prospekt warns that, without collaboration with the Combine, humanity's history will be reduced to something like the Burgess Shale, an extremely important fossil bed in British Columbia.
  • The Combine's posters often abbreviate it to CMB. The Cosmic Microwave Background is the oldest radiation in the universe and serves as the farthest we can see, defining our observable universe. The Combine come from beyond that.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: While the game is popular worldwide, a notable amount of fanprojects, such as mods and the efforts to preserve the beta seem to come from Russia. This probably has something to do with the game seeming to take place in an Eastern European country that was modeled on Soviet totalitarian atmosphere and its aesthetic. There was even a bootleg Russian bubblegum pack based on the leaked early build, before the game was officially released!
• Good Bad Bugs:
  • When Valve released the Orange Box, that version of the Source Engine came with a fix to bunny hopping, which had long been a mainstay of speed runs. The fix was fairly simple: if the engine detected you were moving forward too fast, it would apply a negative force to slow you down the next time you tried to bunny hop, and as you got faster it would apply a stronger and stronger force to slow you down to below the speed threshold. However, it was possible to trick the engine into applying the force in the wrong direction by turning around in mid-air, making the "negative" force speed you up, then apply even more force with the next jump. This lead to the creation of Accelerated Back Hopping, a technique that dwarfs what you can accomplish with standard bunny hopping. Nice job fixing that, Valve.
  • In the beginning of the chapter Route Kanal, Gordon has to use a moving train as a bridge across the tracks. Since said train is also going under a tunnel, getting hit by the roof of said tunnel, a la Looney Tunes, will send you hurtling across the map, an even past the invisible barriers on the rooftops. There may not be much to see back there, due to those parts not being textured, but it IS pretty funny.
  • Early versions of the game had an oversight where the player could "charge up" the pistol by holding down both mouse buttons to fire multiple shots simultaneously, essentially turning the pistol into a miniature shotgun. This was unfortunately fixed in the Orange Box engine update.
  • Prop flying is a common speedrunning technique that allows you to effectively pull yourself up by your bootstraps. By jumping on top of a prop like a barrel or pallet and then jumping and picking it up repeatedly, it is possible to boost yourself over obstacles and even onto the skybox.
• Harsher in Hindsight: Sometimes, Rebels will utter out a seeming Non Sequitur: "Sometimes, I dream about cheese". It might come off as weird or humorous to the player, but Half-Life: Alyx implies that even common livestock such as pigs or turkeys have been extinct long enough that Russell assumes Alyx has never even heard about them. It makes the aforementioned phrase come less funny and more somber, longing about times that may never return.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Marc Laidlaw's late August 2017 release of Epistle 3 (his thinly disguised outline of the plotline of what was intended to be Half-Life 2: Episode Three) led to the online community to create an "Epistle 3 jam" a series of mods hoping to adapt the mod in some fashion. The joke is that the central gimmick of Epistle 3, the Time Crash nature of the Borealis with Gordon and Alyx fighting across the ship while it flashes across the past and the future, became a level in Titanfall 2, which was already hailed by many as one of the best single-player shooting campaigns since Half-Life as well as Dishonored 2, which was also heavily inspired by the Half-Life games, and whose first game had art design by Viktor Antonov himself.
  • After Father Grigori, Jim French would go on to voice another zombie apocalypse survivor.
• Homegrown Hero: Taken to a new extreme here, as even though it takes place in post-apocalyptic Bulgaria where any semblance of nationstates has been destroyed, 99% of the surviving humans still seem to be American (including Gordon Freeman himself, naturally). On the other hand, it's been stated that Citizens are constantly transferred around, and as such it would make sense for the Combine to put Americans in Bulgaria. That still doesn't explain why everyone can understand each other though; realistically there would be practically no way of understanding each other without knowing a variety of languages (which is precisely what the Combine want to stop rebellion from occuring). Word of God has suggested, however, that were it not for technological constraints of the time, there would have been Citizens in the game who spoke in languages besides English (or whichever localization the player used).
• Hype Backlash: With a fanbase that treats Half-Life 2 as an absolutely flawless work of genius, those players who thought it was merely a good FPS game are often pushed into this.
• Inferred Holocaust: Apparently nearly all Earth wildlife has been eradicated by invasive Xen aliens and Combine forces, including the near-complete extinction of all marine life by Leeches. Half-Life: Alyx shows the title character is not even familiar with common farm animals like pigs or cows. The story never dwells on it, but this means even if humanity is successful in defeating or driving off the Combine, they're still going to have to deal with a global biospheric collapse worse than any mass extinction in Earth's history on top of their massive societal upheaval.
• Iron Woobie:
  • Alyx Vance. For the first years of her life, she lives in the dormitories of Black Mesa, a dangerous and accident-prone research facility. Then, her mother is killed during the Resonance Cascade incident. She only survives because the G-Man saves her life, putting her in a debt that she repays in Episode Two. Fast forward to when she meets Gordon Freeman. She is then separated from him by a malfunctioning teleporter, forcing Gordon to get to Eli's compound himself, fighting Combine along the way. Her father is then captured and the rest of the game is mostly spent trying to rescue him.
    
    In the end, when the dark matter reactor explodes, killing Breen, she only survives because the Vortigaunts teleport her out of the wreckage. In Episode One, the evacuation train Gordon, Alyx and the gang have worked so hard to get running crashes in a wooded area because of a portal storm. In the beginning of Episode Two, she is stabbed twice by the long blades of a Hunter and survives, once again, because of the Vortigaunts. Finally, after Eli, Magnusson, and Kleiner launch the rocket and Gordon and Alyx are about to get into a helicopter to save their friend Mossman, a pair of Advisors smash through the building and kill Eli (her father) right in front of her. This is also a Break the Cutie.
  • Father Grigori, a Russian Orthodox priest and the sole survivor of a village devastated by a headcrab infestation, is forced to fight a one-man war against them for possibly years by the time the player sees him, and has completely lost his mind as a result, but not his resolve. The final time he is seen is behind a mass of fire, shooting dozens upon dozens of zombies to death despite his certain doom.
• The Inverse Law of Fandom Levity: Half-Life 2 is a bleak game about a scientist stuck in a Dystopia where aliens have taken over Earth and are squeezing every resource they can out of it. But Garry's Mod and the torrent of animations its created would have you believe it's about funny faces and wacky flailing ragdolls, not to mention its larger impact on meme culture in general.
• Memetic Mutation: See the series' page.
• Most Wonderful Sound:
  • The high, flatline-like two-tone note that a Metrocop's radio will emit after they die. When a bunch of them play together after a particularly bloody fight, it's like the music of the angels.
  • Firing the .357 revolver generates a satisfying boom letting you know your target just got hit very hard, even if your target ended up being wall behind your enemy.
  • The "duh-duh-duh-tssh" chime of picking up health packs.
• Narm:
  • The high pitched screams of the headcrab zombies fall into this, particularly if you're familiar with some of the more popular mishearings.
  • A bug at release made a lot of characters stutter, which proved to be both annoying and unintentionally hilarious.
  • Whenever you pick up something (which you have to do), Gordon's hands are not shown holding the item, it simply floats in front of him. This was parodied a lot.
  • This can also be done by the player. Because the characters rarely interact with Gordon in "Cutscenes", they just keep on talking as if he's paying attention... when the player can instead be off staring at the wall, swinging a crowbar at their face, messing with interactable props like the mini-teleporter in Kleiner's lab, pointing a gun at their face, throwing physics objects at NPCs like they're toys, rotating around in circles, or getting uncomfortably close to Alyx or Mossman and staring at their chests.
• Nausea Fuel: The Barnacles. On top of being sloppy consumers of all things organic, they'll vomit their entire insides upon being killed, including the bones of anything they recently ate.
• Once Original, Now Common: It is incredibly difficult for anyone who first got into videogames (especially PC gaming) in, say, 2008 or beyond to appreciate the sheer scope of what Half-Life 2 brought to the industry. Objects with physics that interact with the world in a believable, intuitive manner? Complex facial animation and on-the-fly lip sync for speech? Sophisticated enemy AI that behaves in ways that make them seem like thinking, rational beings? HL2 brought all of these things to new heights, and everyone proceeded to work their butts off to match what it did. The result is that in only a few short years after release, many mainstream AAA games had successfully aped what Half-Life 2 brought to the table, and as a result, without the mask of a technological innovator to hide behind, many of the shortcomings in its actual gameplay have become more obvious.
• Paranoia Fuel: When the G-Man is no longer subdued.
  G-Man: Doooooctor Freemaaaaaaaaan...
• Player Punch:
  • "The Alyx Vance clings to the margins." She gets better.
  • Eli Vance's death.
• Porting Disaster:
  • It's no one's fault, really (the Xbox, while being the most powerful console of its generation, wasn't fit to run something as meaty as the Source engine), but the quality of the Xbox version is simply too far away from the PC original to make it worth playing. In spite of massive downgrades to the texture quality and geometry count, the game still runs at a poor framerate most of the time.
  • The PlayStation 3 version of The Orange Box was pretty shabby, with Valve (at the time) not having that much faith in the PS3 and it being outsourced to an unknown team at Electronic Arts.
• Salvaged Story: The fanbase was extremely displeased by what, to Gordon, amounts to a Shoot the Shaggy Dog even worse than the first game. Episode One blows the rage away through a Moment of Awesome for the Vortigaunts that both retcons Alyx's implied death, and changes the whole storyline, showing the G-Man isn't as all-powerful as thought before.
• Scrappy Weapon:
  • The pistol this time around is much less accurate and much weaker than the original, dealing the same damage if not less than the submachine gun. And, unlike the pistol in the first game, pistol ammo in this game isn't shared with the submachine gun, making pistol rounds extremely pointless beyond the Ravenholm chapter. It also has an incredibly weak and ineffectual firing sound compared to the first game's 9mm.
  • Speaking of which, the submachine gun seems powerful and fun to use at first, but later when the Combine soldiers start coming in, it becomes painfully obvious that it is also inaccurate and weak, not even scratching soldiers. There are situations where its under-barrel grenades come in handy, but it hardly makes up for how ineffective the gun itself is. The level Highway 17 helps make it "better" by giving you a bottomless ammo crate for it to deal with the Combine forces and antlions, but once you have to ditch the buggy, it goes back to being this.
  • The buggy's Tau cannon in Highway 17 when compared to the Airboat's pulse cannon. While the pulse cannon has to recharge after 100 shots it feels much more powerful than the tau cannon as it fires extremely fast and can take down Combine vehicles (like the Hunter-Choppers and APC), whereas the tau cannon is much slower and can only take out walking foes. The feeling of destroying a monster chasing after you with its own weapons can also factor into this, as you are hunted by the chopper for most of a chapter before killing it in a climactic battle. The tau-cannon is just given to you and it isn't all that exciting to use. It's made marginally better by Secondary Fire, which is a Charged Attack that will kill things more effectively (though never to the point that you can kill things primary fire couldn't), but the problem there is the game expects you to be familiar with the handheld version from the first game and as such never explains that it has a secondary fire mode.
• Sequel Difficulty Drop: Quite a lot of the infamous Trial-and-Error Gameplay in the original Half-Life is gone, the game's platforming requires far less precision, and overall, the enemies are both weaker and significantly easier to hit this time around. Also, absolute Game Breakers such as the Gravity Gun are available relatively early on.
• Suspiciously Similar Song: The Combine Harvester track sounds like a rearrangement of The Imperial March.
• That One Achievement:
  • "Lambda Locator". It's the lowest-average achievement on Steam and, unlike the other achievements, is probably one of the most difficult to unlock. The player is required to find 45 Lambda caches spread throughout the entire game, and because many of them are well-hidden many players will end up consulting a guide at one point or another. It really says something when "Zombie Chopper" (go through Ravenholm using only the gravity gun) and "Keep Off The Sand!" (a game of "the floor is lava," spread throughout an entire level) have higher percentages of players getting them. As of October 2020, Steam's stats list that only 3.2% of players have the achievement, compared to 5% for "Keep Off the Sand!" and 6% for "Zombie Chopper".
  • Episode One has "One Free Bullet" which refers to the one free bullet you're given to pop a lock off a gate. Afterwards you have to learn to get by using only grenades, rockets, the crowbar, and Gravity Gun. That means no guns nor crossbow. Explosives are scant and you don't get the crowbar until late in the game. To make it even harder you can do it while you try to get "Citizen Escort" and keep four trips of defenseless citizens alive all without firing a shot. Steam's stats list that only 7.2% of players have it as of October 2020.
  • Episode Two somehow manages to have something even worse with "Get some Grub". You have to squish, shoot, and stomp 333 grubs through a maze that spans 3 levels (To the White Forest, This Vortal Coil and Freeman Pontifex). The main source of difficulty is that 333 grubs means all of them, and with the many one-way ledges and grubs hidden in the ceiling, it's very easy to miss a grub or two and lock yourself out of the achievement, none the wiser until you get out of the mines. Guinness World Records 2015 Gamer's Edition even stated that "only 2.3% of the game's owners had managed it as of 5 August 2014" and Steam's stats claim that only 5.6% of players "got some grub" as of October 2020. "Pinata Party" for breaking every web cache has more than twice as much, 13.6%, solely by the fact that it's slightly less difficult to get.
  • Episode Two also has "Little Rocket Man": carry a garden gnome thought the entire game and pop it into the rocket. The main source of agony is the car sections which comprise practically half the game: Gordon can't carry the gnome while he's driving, so it becomes a tedious game of "pick up the gnome, punt it, drive up to the gnome, repeat" unless you find out the rather unintuitive trick of driving with the gnome^note the gnome can be laid down where the rear window would be and it will rarely fall off when driving and even that doesn't work 100% of the time, especially when you're driving into obstacles or when the chopper starts gunning you down, both of which can knock the gnome out of the car. The chopper makes it especially difficult: in addition to shooting out the gnome from the car, it can shoot the gnome away when you're trying to put it back, and it shreds your health as you attempt to reposition the gnome in the car correctly. And, after all that, you won't get the achievement if you forget to close the rocket door or accidentally drop it down the silo (though this can still be rectified with an earlier save). According to Steam global achievement stats, only 7.5% of all players have this achievement as of October 2020.
• That One Level: While Half-Life 2 in general is much easier compared to the first game, there are a few parts where it simply gets nasty.
  • The Nova Prospekt raid at the end of "Sandtraps". In particular, just before you get inside of the prison, your final challenge is fighting two gunships at the same time. Their ability to shoot down rockets gets much more effective with two of them, you need to make 14 successful hits to take both of them down, and health pickups and cover aren't too readily available.
  • The final three maps of "Follow Freeman!"' are easily the hardest of the whole game. The earlier parts of the chapter were already combat-heavy and provided little breathing room, but this part increases up the intensity to 11. First, the outdoor Nexus area pits you against multiple Striders as their introduction as a combat enemy, all individually threatening to the player on their own, and you're forced to run past them before you get the rockets needed to take them all down. The second map has you stalked through a destroyed building by a single Strider while you have to deal with Combine soldiers and battle scanners which can give your position away to your stalker. The third map is the most intense, a full-on warzone between the rebels and Combine, with a pair of Striders doing a terrifying job of suppressing the area. The difficulty is somewhat softened by the high volume of ammo and health, and the endless number of rebels coming to support you.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: D0G looks like he's going to follow you around as a companion at the start of the "Anticitizen One" level. However, while D0G does get one scripted sequence where he proves himself a badass against a group of Combine soldiers, he's forced to split up from Gordon almost immediately after. The Episodes make a bigger show of his prowess, however, with Episode Two in particular demonstrating he can easily outmatch Striders and Advisors alike.
• Ugly Cute:
  • The Antlions after you get the Bugbait, who follow you like eager puppies and attack anyone you tell them to. Before then, of course, they were pure Nightmare Fuel.
  • D0G, who looks like a deformed gorilla but acts like a cuddly little puppy.
  • Lamarr, Kleiner's debeaked pet headcrab. She still retains some of the predatory instincts of her beaked brethren, but weirdly enough this makes her more adorable since Lamarr can't actually latch onto anybody's head. Not to mention she doesn't fuss when Kleiner cuddles her.
• Underused Game Mechanic:
  • The Pheropods weapon that Gordon obtains to control Antlions is only ever put to use at the tail end of "Sandtraps" and throughout a majority of the following "Nova Prospekt" level. Though it does still have some usage afterwards as a make-shift stun item when thrown at enemies, the Pheropods' primary mechanic, controlling an army of Antlions, never comes into play again in the original Half-Life 2 since they stop appearing after "Nova Prospekt." Lorewise, it makes sense that the Antlions stopped appearing after "Nova Prospekt" since they only appear to be nested along the coasts of City 17. And even when you get to use them, they're mostly redundant anyway except as a means of getting Antlions to clear out a cramped space since they automatically attack nearby enemies and return to you once there are no threats. However, even in the following two expansion Episodes when the Antlions finally reappear, the Pheropods to control them are the one weapon you never get again.
  • Half-Life 2: Episode One introduces a fun little mechanic where Alyx can hack Rollermines to fight for the player instead. However, this only happens at two specific locations within the Episode, and doesn't even make a return in Episode Two.
• Unfortunate Character Design: Gabe Newell related how a young designer described creating a creature (which ended up becoming the Strider) that had a penis that would attack the player. Note the location and angle of the Strider's autocannon, and the way it bounces.
• Unnecessary Makeover: A mod example: FakeFactory's Cinematic Mod gave the old Source engine a serious kick in the pants, allowing for far more beautiful environments. While these were applauded, fans everywhere raged at the author's version of Alyx Vance. The mod replaces Alyx's down-to-earth, realistic appearance with a new model based on real-life supermodel Adriana Lima (as seen here◊), wearing a midriff-baring shirt and exposing her cleavage. Later versions removed her bra, showing Alyx's nipples through her shirt. Many Half-Life 2 fans revolted at the changes, stating that one reason for her popularity was because, unlike many video game heroines, she wasn't hypersexualized as originally designed. Other complaints were ripping off character models from Poser and other similar programs that vaguely look like the character in question. It should be noted though, that the installation of these character models is entirely optional.
• Visual Effects of Awesome: The entire game, and despite having been released in 2004 has aged remarkably well as the years have passed. The high interactivity with the environments and realistic character models have only lent themselves to its timeless feel.

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