I can remember back when I was first shown Half Life.  I was just getting out of school and was really into playing Return to Castle Wolfenstein on my PC or anything ever made by id for that matter.  Watching Half Life made me think where is the action in this game?  Seemed really slow to me so I never played the game and eventually buying an Xbox and playing Halo.

Now almost eight years later I'm now playing Half Life 2 (HL2) on my 360 and gaining achievements.  Well, once I started playing HL2 I noticed it was very much what I remembered about watch those few minutes of the first game, slow.  For me the first three hours of Half Life 2 have been a real grind.  I can see that they have a nice physics engine and they love to show it off.  You will have tons of puzzles to keep going forward in the game.  It almost gets to the point where you just start looking for the next ramp or seesaw because that's what you'll need to do to get to the next area.

Funny thing does happen around the 3 hour mark, it kind of gets fun and the story builds up enough that you want to keep going.  Eventually you get some fun weapons to play with like the gravity gun (ok so far it's the only fun gun).  The gravity gun lets you pick stuff up like crates or circular saw blades and shoot them at stuff.  It's kind of cool and lets you chuck some enemies very, very far.

Right now I'm more interested in Half Life 2 than when i started but so far I'm not thinking this game is the best FPS ever.  It's a nice change of pace with all the physics based puzzles but you really lose out on the pacing of the game.  The action so far has been very thinly laced through out the game compared to something like Halo 3.  All the combat set pieces are very small scale.  You never face more than a handful of enemies at a time.  Maybe this changes but so far I'm seven hours in and in need of some faster action.