My play time is exclusively a campaign completion and this review does not consider the multiplayer aspects of Half-Life.

A lot of the design ideas used in Half-Life reflect a time when gaming was almost exclusively about creating an enjoyable, rewarding experience for a single archetypal customer. This means that there is significant focus on creating a feeling of exploration with challenging combat encounters, with the player given a huge variety of tools to try and work through them. Most targets can in theory be taken down with nothing but the crowbar given to the player very early on, and the mechanics of weapon choice are both intuitive and meaningful, with significant incentive to use most weapons given to the player at some point in the game (though most players will inevitably develop preferences).

One of the key ways this is done which is far less common in modern shooters of all descriptions is genuine ammo scarcity. Don't get me wrong, this isn't done to the extent that the player feels obliged to try and avoid shooting (possibly for a brief period in the very early game shortly after acquiring the first pistol), but it does emphasise the need for the player to develop at least some proficiency with most weapons: if you try and blaze through the entire game with the assault rifle, you will simply run out of bullets. This is not the pain point it feels: it encourages player choice and the player's normal awareness of their own ammo reserves provides direct and consequential feedback on the choices made.

Enemy variety is done well. There's only 2-3 huge 'boss' fights, so to speak, but each encounter is deeply affected by the composition of the opposing force and the scenery. More importantly, the AI is excellent, and performs better than most AI for enemies in modern blockbusters. If an enemy becomes aware the player is there, they don't simply forget if the player hides for a bit, and while there are some limitations on the approaches enemies can take (no enemy is able to climb ladders, for instance), within those limitations the AI does not feel like it is adopting the same predictable strategy, over and over (and indeed, the player will usually recognise this by the fact that fights between two AI-controlled forces do not always end the same way).

It's not all impeccable. The game's platforming is rather weak, and there are extended sections of the game which boil down to essentially platforming with minimal combat. Crouch jumping is infamous, but it's not the only issue: fall damage is excessive and often unpredictable, ladders are painful, a lot of intended platforming routes involve jumping on scenery that intuitively a human would know they could never land on on two feet (presumably the player character's collision model is essentially a box); but most pertinently, there's a reason platformers were never generally done in first person - while first person gaming is often an excellent approximation of real life and often feels more immersive, in the real world you generally don't need to look downwards to know where your ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ legs are. The fast paced movement of the player on the ground level is incredibly exciting for shooting sections and incredibly frustrating for precision platforming.

Narratively, I enjoyed myself. It's not exactly a story that's going to end up on a Man Booker shortlist, but the way in which it's communicated is innovative, relies very little on text and dialogue (which is still relatively uncommon in gaming as a genre), but manages to effectively immerse the player in the game's environment and care about the outcome. The final chapters may be somewhat controversial (and I will avoid spoilers despite the game being 25 years old); personally I didn't find them weaker than the previous story, especially given the mechanical backdrop to them is hinted at shortly before the player is introduced to the actual separate premise. At places, I did have to refer to a guide to avoid frustration (Half-Life is excellent at highlighting the importance of some design advancements, such as clarity over which scenery can be interacted with), but on the whole it's an experience I expect I'll think back to often.

8.5/10