Yeah, I noticed the romantic touches too. Again, didn't appreciate them. Kind of something a nerd fanboy would get fuzzy about.

It's only the beginning of Episode 1 that is a little disappointing. It gets a lot better after that, trust me (if not really for a long time). When I first played Ep 1 I was actually pretty meh'd about having to go BACK inside the citadel immediately after narrowly escaping it in the HL2 finale. Crappy writing that. You'll get to kill some crap with regular weapons soon though. Zombines ftl!

As for Alyx...I wasn't talking about her when I was talking about there being quite some "emotional depth" in the episodes. It's mostly Episode 2 that is the dark twin anyways, so you'll see what I mean.

Btw the story of Ep 1 is rather easy to decribe: they need to escape City 17 before it blows to smithereens but need to extract valuable date of the Combine first (from the citadel). That's it really. As I noted in my review of Ep1 (on the CK frontpage) it's very much a 'bridge' between the HL 2 events and later episodes. That means the story isn't always very exciting, but as a game it's still better and cheaper than 90% of all full-game shooters out there.