Have you ever heard someone say that a game was "objectively good"? A stupid thing to say of course, quality is massively subjective to personal opinion and experience. If there WAS such a thing as objectively good, I imagine a lot of valve games would fit the mold and in a way thats why Ive never vibed super hard with them. That might seem contradictory and obviously I'll explain : HL2EP2 and a lot of Valve games are too good.

I think most games need flaws to make their good/great aspects to shine. Would dark souls 1's excellent first half be as fondly remembered without the shitty second half? Would so many fondly remembered early 3d games still be as such without their jank? Would Fallout : New Vegas be so acclaimed for its RPG elements and storytelling without running like absolute shit and crashing to desktop every 45 minutes?

HL2EP2 makes me think to myself "hmm yes very well signposted, good setpiece, etc" all the time. There is a moment where you need to jump by pulling down a metal plate down and tossing a grenade underneath it as you stand on top of the plate such that it launches you upwards. This is mainly achieved by having an explosion mark and a pallet of hand grenades in the room. I understood this inmediately and that is impressive. At the same time though, it always takes me out of the game despite being "good", everything is so transparently playtested to the extreme. To quote a sweary british man "if someone stared at a wall for more than 5 seconds they put a big sign on it saying 'stop looking at this wall' ". I was especially annoyed with the vortigaunt companion in the early bits who might as well have called himself Developer McSurrogate.

Another thing that annoyed me character wise is a thing that might not bother you but I find hard to unnotice when I start to think about it : everyone is so cheerful. You remember in HL2 in City17 how the citizens lived in constant fear of metrocop raids and tried to cope with living under a fascist occupying force? Well clearly those guys should have all joined the resistance cause either Dr Kleiner has spiked their water supply with Prozac or everything is fun and games fighting the combine in the wilderness. I did like Dr Magnusson, even if the attempt to tie everything to half life 1 through community inside jokes continues to be as cringeworthy and unnecessary as always.

Okay, okay, now that Ive gotten that out of the way, I have to agree with the consensus, much better than episode one. I must admit that I have never really gotten all the acclaim that the half life series got after 1. 1 is great but it peaks really early and then slowly becomes kind of tedious culminating in Xen which almost feels like a different game : deliberately alien of course but doesnt feel like a proper conclusion to the previous 3/4ths of the game. That being said, HL2EP2 is for the most part a pretty excellent game which combines OK gunplay with more creative combat encounters especially in the last bit of the game against the striders. The variety, use of puzzles and vehicle sequences and masterful pacing make the game a very smooth experience as the scifi story unfolds and the trademark facial capture and source engine graphics honestly hold up pretty well in my view, but then I did spend most of my early teens playing Gmod.

EDIT : I will say, for everyone who complains about it in modern AAA games, here they have the decency to quip AFTER you have already put the pieces of the puzzle together, rather than just blurting out the answer after 0.5 seconds