It feels like a crutch and it already felt overused in the last map of the Xen chapter. It feels like the "puzzles" are there because Valve games have puzzles, and find-the-dongle-and-put-it-into-the-slot puzzles are among the the most overused and vacuous, especially in this game (recall that such puzzles didn't appear anywhere in the original Half-Life and mechanically, plugging dongles into outlets contributes extraordinarily little gameplay-wise). You could remove the entirety of the search-and-find cables section by replacing it with a single button press and I daresay nothing would be lost. But it cannot be denied that this grinds the action down to a screeching halt for the player to search every inch and corner of the rooms to find what to do and where to go for no obvious or discernible reason. Some of the things you have to do to take the cables are, eh, I guess somewhat unique the one that sticks out for me is the fan one. I wouldn't even call this puzzle solving, since you're just searching for the thing to grab or shoot. Furthermore, once the circuits get overloaded, numerous times in maps 3 and 4 I might add, you're on a constant search for giant bubbling sacs that you need to shoot. It makes no sense why you need to do this, since wouldn't the vorts know what they were doing with having the cables plugged in already? Plus it doesn't really make any sense as to what you're actually doing to get a random green cable to shoot out by attaching two other cables to nearby outlets. You have to find no fewer than 10 cables at the vort lab alone and move them around to outlets nearby. I was annoyed with finding all the dongly cables in Xen, but here it's ramped up to 11. I'm not necessarily opposed to puzzle-solving in an FPS game, but these really can't even adequately be called puzzles. The greater issue I had, which probably cannot be rectified, is the puzzle-solving. The only thing that could really be improved on that front is providing the player with a greater variety of ammo, especially since the player is expected to destroy inanimate objects. The combat (at least of the first four maps, since that's all I've played up to this point), seemed fair and logical. Visually I enjoyed it very well, although I'll echo the sentiment that it seems just a bit too red-orange outside, if for no other reason than the controllers and my crosshair tend to blend in with the sky.
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