How do you improve the aspects of the first-person shooter genre? The ways Valve did it with Half-Life is astounding.
Half-Life was known for being somewhat revolutionary back in 1998. For one, it was a first-person shooter for the PC that had a story. You play as Gordon Freeman, a new member of the Black Mesa Research Facility, a government organization used primarily for scientific experiments. Freeman was assigned to the Anomalous Materials lab, and with the power of a Hazardous Environment Suit, or HEV Suit, he pushes a mysterious alien specimen into the test chamber, and all hell breaks loose. As you progress further into the game, you find out the military decides to do cleanup duty and Freeman has to get out alive. Sure, it felt like something ripped from Doom, but it was told in a way that moved the story along. Freeman would always find security guards or scientists that would tell you a few snippets of the story, and even help you getting through certain areas.
One other revolutionary thing was that the game never uses cutscenes, and it never leaves the first person perspective. It immerses you in, and only breaks up the action with dialog from other characters, but you can still move around and even ignore them if you want. And Half-Life is one of the many games with a silent protagonist. Freeman never said anything, not even screams and groans. This is great as this gives the player many different ways to portray Freeman, from a meek scientist to spouting one-liners that would rival Duke Nukem.
In terms of graphical quality, even in 1998, Half-Life wasn't gonna win awards. Many weapons have unusual animations, like the submachine gun, which has a very funky reload animation. Characters do however bring the added quirk of lip-synching that was done by the game's sound files rather than generated in the game's engine, so this was much better and felt a little more natural, something that would eventually be tweaked and perfected in Half-Life 2. However, characters themselves look real weird as security guards and scientists looked cold and pale, as if they hadn't seen the sun in years. Character variety is also low; don't be surprised if you see the same scientist, security guard, or grunt a million times. It would've been nice to have more variety between character designs.
Half-Life makes you go through various areas, from the office complex of Black Mesa, warehouses, outside in the deserts of New Mexico, even to an alien planet. The levels themselves look believable, as if you really were inside a scientific facility or an alien planet. The game looks bad in Software mode (which is the game's default), but looks substantially better in OpenGL and Direct3D.
The game also paces very well. When you start, you will see simple, meek aliens that can be taken down with a few shots of your pistol, and then you pick up more powerful weapons like the submachine gun, and fight some marines. Then back to aliens. It works because it doesn't get stale, and it's balanced in a way so that it doesn't become a gruntfest later on.
In terms of A.I., it's actually very good. Enemies will retreat if they're low on health, and enemies even limp when they've taken too much damage. They will even hit you with a melee attack if they're close enough to you. Little things like that make the game a bit more believable, but this isn't always the case. For instance, security guards can pump literally a hundred shots into their enemy without ever reloading their gun. Security guards also do not have a close-range melee attack. This never happens with grunts, however.
There's a good mix of real life and futuristic weapons in Half-Life. The melee weapon is a crowbar, which is strange, but with equally odder melee weapons in other first-person shooter games like Quake's Axe and Doom's Chainsaw, it fits. There's a pistol, a revolver, a submachine gun, among other real life weapons. There's an alien weapon and a weapon that looks like it came straight from Ghostbusters (the Gluon Gun). There are also plenty of explosives like satchels and tripmines, but they've been done before. It's a good balance, although most of the time, you'll probably be sticking to the shotgun and submachine gun, with the crowbar being used for small foes like headcrabs.
The game features a decent musical score, which features the gamut of stock suspense tracks to a few new ambience and action tracks, which mostly fit in all the situations given. For instance, early on in the game, you end up in this rocket test firing area, and then you hear this techno-y ambient track, which features woodwind instruments, and it's my favorite track in the whole game. Half-Life's sounds are a bit mixed; a handful of the weapons sound quite weak and lifeless. The voice acting in Half-Life is really good, and only a handful of lines are a bit poor. One strange thing is that you hear two scientist voices when you begin, but then you hear only one voice throughout the rest the game. Marines also sound strange as they sound like they're using a digital voice synthesizer, it doesn't really sound human. It doesn't really detract, however, and it also works to a gameplay advantage. Although in real life, marines would not shout out commands that give away their position.
Once you complete Half-Life, there's the deathmatch component, which is good and fun for a bit, but tends to get a little stale after a while. My copy of Half-Life also came with Team Fortress Classic, which is a Half-Life remake of the Team Fortress mod for Quake. I'm not gonna go into large detail, but it definitely supplements Half-Life as TFC features a lot of gameplay modes and still has a small community for it. However, this may not appear in all copies of the game, it appears in mine because it's the Game of the Year edition. Later versions, including the last Half-Life patch pre-Steam, came with a deathmatch modification that was a nod to Quake, Deathmatch Classic; and Ricochet, which resembles the movie Tron, and was inspired by an old arcade game, Discs of Tron. These last two are nice time-wasters, but I don't expect you'll be playing either of these for hours on end; they're a slight novelty.
Half-Life is mostly based on the Quake engine, so some effects from that game like jumping with a powerful weapon (in Half-Life's case, the gauss gun), "bunny hopping" and other quirks seem like holdovers, but it's fun because it doesn't strive on being realistic. Not like Half-Life itself was realistic to begin with.
For anyone who has never played a first-person shooter before, or has never played Half-Life, you need to play this game. Now. While graphics and sound look a bit dated, if you look past that, you got a great game on your hands. Plus there's a lot of singleplayer and multiplayer modifications, which extend replay value. Half-Life is a classic PC first-person shooter that should not be missed.
Pros: Great immersion, good technical advances for its time, good music, comes with extra games (Team Fortress Classic, Deathmatch Classic, Ricochet).
Cons: Weak graphics, average sound, not much character variety.