I’m resurrecting this thread to put Strider Mountain into this list. The game is great, very challenging, an interesting plot, seems fairly long(some 17 chapters?), and some very interesting cutscenes, yet despite this, I find that a lot of the game I feel I’m grinding. The enemies are ridiculously accurate for a HL2 game, and it feels like they never stop coming and it doesn’t make it feel action packed, just tedious. On top of that, even though the cut scenes feel extremely polished, the 3rd person perspective keeps breaking immersion and pulls me out of the character. Did they learn nothing from HL and HL2?
Even worse than the cutscenes are the way that the path ahead is opened up to you. Where in HL1 and HL2, if your path ahead was blocked, you were almost always the one who unblocked it. In Strider mountain, 90% of the time, your path will be blocked by a simple locked door that will only be opened by the combine coming through to try to kill you. BUT this is only triggered when you try to go through a completely DIFFERENT locked door. It’s like playing a Zelda game where the door of a dungeon wont unlock until you’ve killed every enemy in that room except that its done in EVERY ROOM and the rooms are BORING.
