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Notes -
In a number of cases, that was a good thing.
The combination of puzzles and highly-costly information is unfun. A number of the puzzles require you to commit suicide in order to gain the necessary intel. The one where you have to lure an alien into a Tesla coil, for instance - AFAIK, the only way to figure out that the Tesla coil is there is to run past the alien, get cornered in the Tesla coil, and die like a bitch, hopefully not before you figured out what the bad-graphics thing you're looking at actually was.
Puzzles plus permanently-missable information are also not nice. The part where you have to fire the rocket into the alien, for instance, has the main clue come from a Barney, who is hard to hear and AFAIK only gives it once - and you can easily save after that, without a way to progress.
And I mean, it's not like there weren't puzzle games already! LucasArts had been doing them forever, and Zork Nemesis was a 3D puzzle game in '96. Half-Life was only an innovation in trying to be both an FPS and a puzzle game at the same time, and frankly it's an object lesson in why they often don't play nice together.
(I will say, a lot of the problems it has were obviously fixable, just not with the technology - particularly the graphics - of the time. In-game maps - even literal floor diagrams, like the ones present in buildings IRL for evacuation purposes - would have helped so much.)
On the other hand, I will note one thing about HL, and particularly to @OliveTapenade - Counter-Strike was a Half-Life mod.
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