played HL1 last year still looks a lot better than most games from the 90's
Half-Life looked pretty bad on release with the exception of elements like that robot in the intro which I thought looked super realistic at the time with the specular on its chrome parts (but wasn't, I'd just been a console gamer). It wasn't the graphics that could keep people playing. The later Blueshift pack improves the character/enemy/weapon models significantly, but does nothing for the boxy levels and their textures. But I guess you're right as it came out near the end of the 90s so it has like 8 years worth of often far older games to be compared to, many of them with primitive and hybrid 3D solutions. Even Wolfenstein 3D qualifies.
But yeah, it's worth playing for sure as that game structure is great and still isn't very common, sadly. The whole continuous world and feeling of adventure deal over level based shooting galleries. Plus, it's a lot better than Half-Life 2, graphics aside.
Although the shooting mechanics and enemy reactions could have used some work even back then. If you can get
Counter-Life (iirc) working properly these days it might be better played with it, as it basically replaces the weapons with those from Counter-Strike, including their behaviour, as in recoil and the like, which feel better and more modern for the single player game.
I'm not sure how balanced it was, but they were integrated well enough, buying them from health stations and stuff.
