Great game but eclipsed by Episodes One and Two.
As I was wrapping up the final level, it's easy to forget this game is so old. The environments and characters still look fantastic after all this time, and the action is just as fun as anything I've played in Crysis or Call of Duty 4, despite all their bells and whistles.
Even the storyline picked up toward the end. (Too bad it took a dozen-some hours -- and 3 years -- for me to get to this point. I could just never sustain my interest past the water buggy level in all my previous attempts to play through the game.)
That said, I don't think I'd ever play through this game again for any reason.
The game world isn't absorbing like Bioshock's Rapture, which warrants at least 2 playthroughs just to take in all the details, back-story, and mess with different plasmids. The combat is fun, but unlike emergent-gameplay-darlings like Crysis or Bioshock, you can't approach fights in any way besides shoot-shoot-run-shoot over and over. And obviously there's no co-op, so you'd never play this with a friend just for shits 'n' giggles.
I will say what's finally endeared me to the Half-Life series as a whole -- the puzzles. I used to hate these things in Half Life 1. Any sort of jumping encounters or puzzle encounters, I absolutely abhored and just wanted to get to the next shoot-out. But now that AAA shooters are a dime-a-dozen and after especially playing through the genius of Portal, I've come to appreciate and love those Valve spatial problems and irregular level design.
