Quote Originally Posted by Warsaw View Post
Forget about Half-Life 2? That game flows even better than Halo.
The key thing about combat flow is the number of weapons available to the player.

In Halo, you carry two weapons, two (four in Halo 3) grenade types, and one of each is readily available to be used at will. One button to swap weapons, another to swap grenades, and fire/alt-fire to use either.

TF2, each class has a primary, secondary, and melee weapon, and you can easily cycle through them (unless you're rolling Engineer or Spy, in which there's one or two extra items to trip over). Just scroll the mouse wheel or hit 1, 2, or 3.

Half-Life 2, on the other hand, is a mess. Gordon carries half an armory with him, and god forbid you need to reach for your .357 when you're wielding grenades, especially if you're not good with weapon category hotkeys. I will admit that there is the "last weapon" and gravity gun hotkey, but I rarely find myself actually using those and instead cycling through my whole inventory for the weapon I want. What saves it, however, in single player is that each level encourages you to use a certain weapon to achieve your ends. HL2DM, you spawn with the G-Gun and a melee weapon, and you're rarely alive long enough to accumulate more than 2 weapons.