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A great physics engine does not a great game create Just got this game and put in a couple hours last night. Excellent graphics, excellent physics, smooth gameplay. I particularly liked the realism of the other people and the "body" physics they use -- no more dead zombies falling into walls or laying horizontal on a slanted staircase, the interaction with the environment is perfect (just watch the way someone falls down a staircase...) I had two problems, though: 1) Load times are too frequent. Maybe I'm spoiled by RPG's that offer huge, seamless worlds, but I was annoyed at having to pause what seemed like every 10 minutes for "Loading". If every RPG in the world can offer seamless loading of a huge environment, why can't HL2? I'd gladly sacrifice some graphics if it meant they could do away with pauses to load between areas. 2) Gameplay was way too predictable. Maybe I've just played too many FPS games, but HL2 was really formulaic. There's only 1 path to take, any other path is just a deadend with supply crates, it felt very arcadish (as opposed to immersively realistic). Like oh, the way is blocked! Well, good thing someone left a big ramp here, which I can't use because it's not at the right angle, but luckily someone left just the right number of floating blue containers here that I can use the jack it up to the correct angle to make the jump! I mean come on, okay, you have a nice physics engine, we get it, you didn't have to set up a time consuming yet completely obvious puzzle just to demonstrate the fact. It was interesting in a "it's neat the physics engine can do this" sort of way, it was not interesting in a "this is a fun aspect of the game" sort of way. I almost feel like I'm playing a demo moreso than a game. Like they set things up to say "look what our engine can do" rather than setting out to create an awesome level that's fun and immersive to play. So here's my advice to Valve: Stop letting your programmers do level design. Design levels that are fun and immersive and don't worry about whether or not every nuance of your physics engine is being demonstrated. That's pretty annoying.