The visuals and gameplay in HL2 are excellent, but the story is a little dissappointing.
To start off the visuals in HL2 are some of the best I've seen. The environment detail as well as character emotions are stunning. The souce engine is the best part. If you throw a grenade at a combine guy get some popcorn because it will be a nice show. When the other characters talked to you, Alyx the most, the emotions make it very real. You'll see the person go from happy to pissed if something caused it. The gameplay, I'd say, is better in HL2 than in HL. My all-time favorite gun is the gravity gun. I just love picking up a heavy object and hurl it into a combine troop and watch them both fly back. Or taking a flamable barrel and throwing it into a mob of zombies. You are capible of setting up traps for your enimies. Most of it is done in ravenholm as well as toward the end of the game. Yes, you do get to fight with other people in the game, also mostly toward the end.
Despite all of this great stuff in HL2, some I may have missed, there are still some things I am dissappointed about. The difficulty is relatively easy in the game, most of the time when I die is mostly due to sliding off a cliff by accident. Maybe only once or twice I was killed by an enemy. The story was dissappointing and confusing for me. You do meet some new characters and old ones return. But I think people wanted to know most about was the G-Man, which you don't learn anything except that he wants you to do another job for him. At first I didn't know why I was fighting anybody, other than because I was being attacked. I guess the whole reason is becuase you were supposed to go to Nova Prospect and you didn't, I don't know. One last thing I didn't like was you were fighting combine more than aliens and stuff. What happened there?
Overall, HL2 is a great game. You explore very interesting areas and fight new enemies as well as old ones. We'll see what the next HL game brings.