Half-Life is undeniably a milestone in first person shooter design, a watershed moment in immersion and narrative for action-oriented games, and of course an extremely impressive display of technical prowess.

It's also a bit of a janky fucking mess lmao

There's a lot of real charm here, the game has a sense of style that you rarely got from anything chasing realism at the time, and frankly one you rarely get from anything chasing realism now, and there's definitely some stretches where the game is pitting you against really interesting enemies and it's great fun for a while. At the same time, in many places it overreaches what was really doable on this modified version of the Quake engine and ends up offering setpieces that range from interesting but unrefined, to simply unfun, to borderline unplayable. Eventually it started asking me to fight highly-mobile underwater enemies while harshly limiting the arsenal with which I could do so and I decided I'd had enough. The game had landed on "induce motion sickness" as its next gimmick and I just couldn't do it. I don't regret the time I spent with the game, though, it really is a fascinating piece of video game history and when it's firing on all cylinders it really is simply fantastic.