Oddly, I find HL a much more convincing journey too. It's more like a sci-fi Call of Duty in a lot of ways, and it does it excellently - but it never surprised me as often as its forerunner did. HL2 doesn't mix things up anywhere near as, bar the vehicle sections and some physics-puzzling. That has its place and I certainly admire its accomplishments, but collapsing elevators, tentacle beasts and hapless scientists perishing in their dozens is something I’m much more inclined to return to.
HL the first is a b-movie and it knows it, but HL2 comes off, despite knowing comedy beats, as a lot more aloof, a lot more convinced it’s something more than an action game.
While the events of HL1 are hardly comical – alien invasion leads to massacre, exacerbated by governmental evil – Black Mesa is nonetheless a jollier place to be than the oppression and horror of City-17. (note - I'm pretending Xen didn't happen for the purposes of this post. HL2 is more 1984-as-action-movie, and while it’s marvellously well-realised, far more polished and thematically consistent, I don’t find that as thrilling as all of HL1’s rip-roaring high adventure. I also much prefer the first game, for all its greater shlockiness. I simply don’t consider HL1 and HL2 to be especially comparable games, despite sharing a lead character, partial arsenal and a name. There ended up being a couple of exceptions to this rule, and the one I particularly fought for was Half-Life. And yet still no-one nominated Big Mutha Truckers 2. These rules differ from year to year, and in 2008 one of them was “only one game per series.” So we couldn’t say Thief and Thief 2, or Morrowind and Oblivion – which sounds harsh, but the idea was to ensure as diverse a list as possible. At the annual Who Can Shout The Loudest competition that is the PC Gamer UK Top 100 meeting, there are rules.
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