There is actually two workaround I've found to this that work for almost every instance.Ya know what'sthe one thing that really defeats this game in comparison to HS1. The transparency in objects. In almost every angle, every wall, every object, every floor gets in the way. Something that didn't happen as much is HS1. Not to mention the brightness. My god, what were they thinking with those walls. Just the other day, i finally found a transparent wall like the ones in HS1. and it has another inverted wall opposite to it. My god man.
The first is the easiest. Go to System -> screen effect then scroll all the way down till you see "near clip plane" slider as in the pic here. Slide that sucker to the right. All the way for full effect, less for less effect. This basically makes everything within a certain distance of "you" invisible. Only down side is that this also includes the character, so if you zoom into them too much you get this weird xray thing. That's when you slide it less. Try it out on a problem map to see what I mean.
The second thing is much more annoying to use but it's helpful if you're not moving around the map too much. You activate the Map option of the side menu, and "deactivate" all the stuff on one side of the map. So in small rooms you can deactivate an entire wall so you end up with a 3 walled room for example. It's a real pain though cause some map creators don't put things together so you have to deactivate each item individually vs when it's a folder where you can just deactivate that and everything in it goes poof. But it's handy for things like static shots or scenes where you're in a the same side of the room all the time. (edit to add: this is also a good option to modify maps when there's elements you don't want in your scene).
I usually just use the first option though as that works more than 90% of the time.