I think this is the first time I’ve finished this game. I’ve played it several times before on different platforms but always gave up before the end. There are only ten levels in the game, but a few of them are copies of previous levels that you go through in reverse. It’s clear that the development was rushed, because even within those levels there are sections that are copied over and over to pad out the game. The level called The Library is the one that people normally call out as having done this, but I think it is pretty common throughout the whole of the game.
I found myself searching around on the web for other peoples opinions since this is one of the highest rated games of all time. There are people that feel the way I do, but a lot of the retorts are people saying that you had to be there at the time, and playing it now you don’t see everything that it revolutionised. The thing is, I did play it at the time, and I felt the same then. I can see what it did, the controls were excellent, the levels can be quite large, the enemy AI can be quite interesting. Half Life came out on the PC several years before and is in a whole different league when it comes to story telling and level design in a first person game. Even Doom from 1993 has much better levels, and have enemies that fight each other despite people claiming Halo did that first. If it’s just for console I think GoldenEye and Perfect Dark are significantly more interesting games. The controls have aged very poorly, but you can map around that on an emulator.