Half-Life 2
I don't see HL2 as a masterpiece. In some ways I compare it to Crysis. It's more about tech and less about game. I played using the update mod. The cinematic mod adds too much visual clutter, pollution and changes the intended atmosphere.
After playing HL2 I finally understood what is wrong with Black Mesa. BM expected the player to know all the physics. They imported puzzles and gameplay elements from HL2, episode 1 and 2. That's why I didn't knew what to do to advance in many parts of BM. In HL2 there are secondary areas that diverge from the main route and many dead ends. What offsets the dead ends and guide the player are the lights, enemies and items. In BM they forgot about proper design to guide and just placed everything in the levels as they saw fit. In HL2 there are mini tutorials that tech you something, for example the physics. In BM those mini tutorials were absent.
I also played F.E.A.R. years before finally playing HL2. Now I see the similarities. In F.E.A.R. we had obstacles that required the player to turn off the power or raise the level of the water. They seem to have been borrowed from HL2. The urban areas in F.E.A.R. are pretty much reminiscent of HL2. The same darkness and the lighting is very similar. Both games had a lot of wooden crates to be broken.
Despite cool level with snipers and the battle against the striders, which were really fun, I have to comment on Nova Prospekt. The level design there clearly didn't perform well. The player controls an army of aliens and the prison just doesn't have enough space to move around. The level design in the rest of the game fails sometimes. In some cases I became lost because I couldn't see where to go. The level design clearly improved in episodes 1 and 2.
The facial animations in HL2 were very good. I could compare them to Naughty Dog and PS3. Comparing HL2 to Return to the Castle of Wolfenstein, Unreal, Quake 2, Red Faction. HL2 had water physics, picking up objects from the ground, reflections on the water's surface that captured the geometry of the world around. It was more advanced. The physic based puzzles were simple and clever. The gravity gun was genius. Bioshock had the telekinetic powers that were similar to the gravity gun and this was years later. To lift a barrel or box and then use it as a weapon was pure fun.
I must say that out of all things. The sky in HL2 was something that stuck in my mind. It was simply one of the best pieces of art ever made! I don't know how they made it, but it was superb. Crysis, which came years later, has a much more boring sky. Rage had a photorealistic sky, but it had a more "photo" aspect to it that didn't quite match the game's atmosphere. HL2 did something with its sky that made it look realistic and had depth. I mean, layers, clouds, sun, it didn't had the appearance of a real photo taken but of a game's realtime rendering engine.
Valve said that they regret having to develop both the game and the engine concurrently. I can see how the game suffered from it. The car and hovercraft levels are pretty bland. Almost a techdemo. The hovercraft, in particular, remind me of how the last part of Halo CE was with the vehicle. The level was a linear racing track with obstacles to showcase driving physics. The hovecraft level in HL2 was a linear track to showcase physics.
