Even with the MMod to improve the rubbish gunplay, this still feels undercooked and incredibly sparse in any sort of meaningful or impactful storytelling. Expanding the setting to an entire city and its outskirts, while changing the stakes to being a standard freedom fighting tale against a tyrannical and Orwellian occupying alien race, Half Life 2's failings to me as a story all route back to Valve's insistence on "immersion" with Gordon being a silent protagonist. The player not saying anything honestly fits the scale and structure of Half Life 1 fine, with your "quest givers" as they were, doing the heavy lifting on what was essentially a hallway of tasks and objectives. The story and time gap Half Life 2 delivers to the player from minute one I found to mix egregiously against the format of a silent protagonist. The player has all these questions; What happened after the end of Half Life 1? What became of Black Mesa, Where did the Combine come from? Why are they here? What is the context for all that the game wants me to care about? Freeman having a voice, personality and an ability to ask questions to fill in these gaps both he and the player have is a lacking element for someone like me who so desperately wants this game to work as a full and satisfying experience. Valve putting much more focus on the story during in game cutscenes, including new and established characters expressing their doubts, theories, plans and their love for one another is in direct contrast to how uninvolved Gordon, the protagonist is in this story and these scenes. This is all clearly a clash between Valve's own design philosophy and my own preferences but I can't shake these feelings.

Bold move on GSC's part to make the second game in the series more broken than the first. But with mods and fixes applied the shooting is actually even better than SoC. With the addition of the faction wars system (while not being fully smoothed out to prevent repetition and annoyance) and a stronger emphasis on world building through tangible writing and conversations, Clear Sky is still a worthy entry in the series and provides some of the best and uniquely intense shootout sequences I've played in a game.

Stalker's most streamlined official release. Each mechanic and gameplay element has been refined to a very satisfying degree. Although due to it's military centered plot, the story is more an afterthought and feels far less fantastical and has far less world building. At the same time I appreciate that this takes the opportunity to show the Zone from the perspective of a group that has always been fully antagonistic in the previous games. Featuring only 3 maps instead of the 10-12 in SoC and CS is deceptive in making the game feel shrunken down. Luckily these 3 areas are all just as wonderfully detailed as the series standard, now are far more open in design so there's more than 2 or 3 directions to go or angles to approach a point of interest. The titular Pripyat map in particular never failing to give me chills with it's imagery and atmosphere. A series highlight for me being a half hour shootout with a handful of squads of an enemy faction in one of Pripyat's main areas during a nighttime thunderstorm, with the only lighting being the lighting flashes along with my nightvision goggles. Absolutely legendary atmosphere.