I can understand many complaints about Half-life 2 the AI, the gunplay, underused physics, the driving parts (though I think many people misinterpret that last part) and agree with most of those to an extent, but one thing I cannot understand is criticisms of its enivornments, and to a lesser extent, its landscapses. Those things that help compose the world.
One of Half-Life 2's greatest strengths, if not its greatest, is its world building. Half-Life 2 does a better job at creating the feeling of a living world than almost any other game, that I've played, including all the Halos. A large part of this is because Half-life 2's world is dynamic it changes. When you first step off the train at the beginning of the game, you're greeted by a large, dominating viewscreen of Dr. Breen. You see Overwatch forcing people out of their homes. Later on, you witness resistance members tearing down a similarly large screen of Breen, and at several points you observe Combine walls slowly eating the city away. Then you think back to the beginning of the game and realize the following: Overwatch isn't moving people to terrorize them, they're being corralled.
The living world is helped greatly by the level design and its continuity. Half-Life's level design follows a theme of "guided exploration": You're not just walking down a hallway, you'll go through a hole in the wall, to a bathroom on the other side, and walk out of that to a row of cell blocks. There's a strong sense of continuity in the game: It seems like, and is for the most part, one long journey. At any point, from my experience, the player feels he or she can turn around and walk all the way back to the beginning of the game.
The environments are varied and transition smoothly from one to the next. Ravenholm's atmosphere and emphasis on the gravity gun are far different from Highway 17's misty beach scenery and "stop and fight" gameplay.
I can understand where you're coming from in that the environments are "boring" some of them I can't see at all, like Raveholm but many of the landscapes are barren in a certain way. And there's a point to that: The Combine are draining Earth of its resources. There's not much left.
I know this post will be completely out of context of whatever discussion is going on at the moment (bulletin's probably up), but given how many people dislike, or don't think highly of, Half-Life 2, and for completely understandable reasons, but I think HL2's fantastic world building is something I think most of us can agree on. This response is late cause I had a work meeting, then had to take an emergency shift to work a band.
