User blog comment:Damac1214/Why Call of Duty is Call of Duty, Fallout is Fallout, Halo is Halo, and that they aren't going to be changing anytime soon/@comment-78.97.91.207-20130312163813/@comment-3967954-20130312201032

Dunno, the story seemed a bit poor to me. I lapped it up at the time, but looking back, it seems kind of generic and boring, from the "alien invasion" core concept of Half-Life to the "1984"-esque stages of Half-Life 2, both of which have been done to death in books, films and video games.

I also notice that the Half-Life franchise has little original content in terms of design. Lots of aspects of the Combine seem distinctly wiffy of the Empire from Star Wars, the Headcrabs are basically just taken straight out of Alien, the Striders are near-identical to those things from War of the Worlds, and the zombies are...well, zombies. I'm not trying to suggest it's a rip-off, but it does feel like Valve were trying to shoehorn too many science-fiction elements into one game.

I couldn't honestly give a flying fuck about any of the main characters. I guess Barney and Kleiner were kind of funny, but Alyx is basically Gordon's personal door-opening tool and Eli is barely even in the game, so it's hard to give a damn about him. And Breen? Possibly one of the worst villains in a video game, with the battle against him at the end being especially anti-climatic.

But I don't hate the franchise, as this post would have you think. I used to be, and I guess I still am, a big fan of it. I accept that it was revolutionary at the time. At the time being the key words. People tend to act like Half-Life 2 is the holy grail of gaming. In my opinion, it's only the holy grail of gaming in the same way that Pitfall was the holy grail of gaming back when that was released.