I dunno, it just seemed obsessed with its own gimmickry, none of which had anything to do with shooting things. The ammo counts were tiny because they wanted you to use the junk-hurling machine, there were stupid, out-of-place physics puzzles that made you feel like you were playing the physics system rather than playing with it (stop the helicopter chase! Time to push a washing machine into a hole!), endless scenes of nothing but unskippable on-the-nose exposition delivered by people standing still and staring at you disconcertingly (and sometimes even walking backwards just so you could see their facial animation) while you stood in a locked room full of nothing-to-do, the incredibly empty buggy and airboat levels, the stupid, tedious section where you had to use bits of hard-to-land-on junk to cross sand, the jumping puzzles, the strange sense the entire game was about everyone in it except you...
Hate to say it, but it did absolutely nothing for me; the only part I really enjoyed was Ravenholm. I liked the original Half-Life and Opposing Force, even if they haven't aged well, but of all the games I have played through (often multiple times for recording) I've only bothered to beat HL2 once and haven't ever stuck through either Episode or felt any compulsion to do so.
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