To be honest, I was a bit annoyed by the combine.Yeah, it was notably evil they kept coming out of nowhere.
I'm with you visually. The level design was interesting but they had some parts with very low detail levels that could have easily had more added in to make it look better (Square broken walls!? wtf!?)
It runs about 30fps for me, same with a friend on a 7800 or something. Kind of dissappointed with that, but then again I insist on 1280x full specs.