Still thinking a lot about how much Black Mesa's Xen feels like a complete disgusting counter to everything it's supposed to represent. How it feels much more like a portfolio-driven set of levels in terms of design rather than anything cohesive. How, despite being on a completely alien majestic world, the way you actually interact with said world is obscenely familiar, trivial. You do the same sort of puzzles you did in stuff like Office Complex or earlier. Even in space, you cannot escape 30+ minutes of connect power cord, walk to area, shoot 2-3 enemies, connect power cord. Xen is not Alien. It isn't an apotheosis either. You are empowered to enact a simulacra of other games instead, like later half-life games with the elevator and chase sequence. I do not hold Xen in HL1 in the highest regard possible (nor do I for HL1 much in general anymore, honestly :/), but it was at its core a fervent 'betrayal' of the familiar. It's reviled for this decision but it is altogether fitting, how platforming is a disgusting poor feeling challenge because, well, this planet was not built for the likes of you. You're simply fighting through a world that was never expecting you to be here. But in Black Mesa it doesn't even bother to truly be dangerous. Granted, that's true of Black Mesa in general the more I mull over it. There's a lot to dissect on how Marines function both as an aesthetic issue and a mechanical one here vs all of the other HL's enemies. In a way, Black Mesa is a betrayal in of itself to me because it seeks not to conserve any spirit of what it's remaking as much as it pushes it through a meat grinder (albeit, with soft hands working the parts, I won't say crowbar's effort was exactly soulless) of HL2 and later design. And to that it breaks down most of those foundations until you have something almost unrecognizable for those who played HL1 and Opposing Force in terms of feel and play and understanding. The aesthetic, on a technical and story lens, is conserved to some degree, in grander majesty. But at what cost?

Lowering the bar.

Black Mesa is a fan remake-cum-reimagining of Half-Life, and it shows. It’s a very technically impressive game, extracting just about everything it can possibly wring out of the damp towel that is the Source engine. It’s a fairly well-designed game, by virtue of most of its elements being copied over wholesale from the original Half-Life. It’s obviously made by people who are very, very passionate about Valve’s work. But Black Mesa forgets, omits, or changes enough of what worked before that it ultimately commits the mortal and unforgivable sin of making Half-Life kind of boring, a crime for which it must be punished by making it boil upside-down beneath the lake of ice for all eternity.

I like Half-Life a lot. I hardly love playing Half-Life, but it’s a game that I both enjoy and respect, which is a sadly uncommon combination. I’ve never existed in a world without Half-Life, a statement which I’m hoping will make some of you wither into dust, and that makes it a bit difficult to personally gauge the impact it had. Obviously, there are hundreds upon hundreds of reports detailing exactly what made Half-Life so special. There are articles and videos and commentary tracks all recounting all of the little quirks and nuances that later shooters silently adopted because it was what they were expected to do now. I can appreciate it from a sort-of dispassionate, outside perspective; as far as I can tell, shooters before Half-Life were mostly just copying Doom’s homework, for better and for worse. If nothing else, you can absolutely tell that a big shift to a more cinematic style was emerging with Half-Life — again, for better and for worse.

Regardless of the finer details, Half-Life is now a very old game. Twenty-five years old, in fact. And the neat thing about games that get that old is that it inherently primes people for a remake. “The gameplay needs an update”, “the graphics look bad”, “fix Xen”, the masses say. It’s a mentality you have for toys. Make it shiny, make it new, make it talk when you pull the string on its back, make sure you add lens flares and ray tracing. It’s certainly nothing that Half-Life needs. Half-Life is already an incredibly solid game that had a fierce impact on the industry and near single-handedly made Valve the monolith that it is today. To suggest that Half-Life — just about any game, really — needs a remake is to fundamentally assign this toy mentality to art.

But, hell, a remake could still be cool.

I like Half-Life, and Crowbar Collective likes Half-Life, and a lot of other people all really like Half-Life. Besides, the game has already been made for them. If all they’re doing is porting it from GoldSrc to Source, what’s the worst that could happen?

We ultimately don’t know the worst case scenario, because it never came to pass. We do, however, know of a pretty rough scenario, which is Black Mesa releasing in the state that it’s in.

The initial few levels are actually very impressive, largely because of how close they play to the original. The tram ride is there, the resonance cascade is there, the brutal ammo restrictions and tight corridors filled with headcrabs and zombies are still there. Hell, even your first encounters with the aliens are tense and unforgiving, encouraging you to use flares to light enemies on fire in order to conserve your ammo. It’s neat! All the way from the start of Anomalous Materials to the end of Office Complex, Black Mesa feels remarkably like Half-Life fully realized. It’s all shiny and pretty, you’ve got some mechanics to play with that were originally intended but didn’t make it to the final release, and it’s a very enjoyable time. You can even forgive Crowbar Collective for getting rid of the scientist who dives through the window and says “greetings”.

And then We’ve Got Hostiles starts.

The HECU still look like they’re holding MP5s and pistols, but they’re secretly wielding Freeman-seeking laser beams. There’s no longer an ounce of hesitation on their part; if they see a hair on your head poking out from cover, they’re shooting you, and you’re taking damage. They’re like Blood cultists in body armor. Also in keeping with pre-Half-Life design decisions, their AI has been drastically dumbed down. The HECU will still at least try to flank you, but they no longer seem all that interested in the concept of their own survival. They’ll rush you down open corridors with no cover, seemingly only interested in getting as in your face as they possibly can, regardless of whether they’re holding an SMG or a shotgun. Throwing a grenade at their feet will make them loudly announce that there’s a nearby grenade, but they don’t ever seem to actually try getting away from it. They’ll do the little Source Engine shuffle that the Combine like to do — if you’ve played enough Half-Life 2, you know exactly what I’m referring to — and then blow up. This is in obvious and stark contrast to the HECU in Half-Life who, while hardly all the avatars of John Rambo, at least seemed like they weren’t showing up just to die. Combat in Black Mesa against the Marines largely just boils down to you and a grunt sprinting at one another with the fire button held down and you winning the war of attrition by virtue of being the only guy here with power armor. Compared to the earlier, more impactful Black Mesa fights against Vortigaunts and houndeyes, this is a letdown; compared to the HECU in the original, it’s shocking.

Given how frequently you enter skirmishes with the Marines, it's something you really can't ever get away from for the overwhelming majority of the game. Crowbar Collective mentioned that their goal was to "make combat more intense", and it seems as though they've tried to do that simply by flooding rooms with significantly more enemies. By my count, Half-Life's We've Got Hostiles pits you against 21 HECU; Black Mesa sends out 32. It doesn't sound like much, and it isn't at first, but it starts to add up fast. Someone on Reddit actually went through and counted every single on-screen HECU kill, and it comes out to over 550 in Black Mesa compared to Half-Life's 250. When you also take into consideration the fact that pre-Xen levels are condensed compared to the original (with On A Rail being noticeably cut way down), the enemy density is completely out of control.

It's not just that there are more of them now, either. The HECU take roughly the same amount of bullets to put down (about 60 health in Black Mesa relative to the original 80), and your ammo is even tighter than it used to be. Being able to carry 250 SMG bullets with ten grenade rounds on the alt-fire was a bit too freeing and a bit too fun, so now you're hard-capped at 150 SMG bullets and three grenade rounds. The pistol now only holds 150 rounds, instead of 250. The shotgun now holds 64 shells instead of 125. The enemy AI is somehow stupider than the one from twenty-five years ago, so it's not like the game has been made any more difficult now that Gordon's got the HEV suit without pockets; holding the MP5 at head height and clicking from a distance seems to do most of the work for you, and the HECU drop about as much SMG ammo as it takes to kill them. The optimal strategy, it seems, is to just hang back and fish for damage multiplier headshots with the MP5 and then go to the next slaughtermap room to continue the process for the next seven hours until Xen.

While Half-Life's Xen was the end product of tightening deadlines and dwindling budgets, Black Mesa's Xen exists almost as a complete refutation of the original's design circumstances; it very obviously got an overwhelming amount of development time and assets and takes up nearly a third of the new game, whereas the previous Xen was over and done with in about twenty minutes. I think Xen is where Black Mesa most obviously becomes a fan game, because it's clear that nobody in charge ever felt the need to say "no" to anything. It's incredibly long, packed to the gills with scripted setpieces and references to later Half-Life titles, and it keeps using the same wire connecting puzzles and conveyor belt rides over and over again in the hopes that making Xen longer will make Xen better. There's a section here in Interloper where you have to bounce off of one of three spring platforms to kill a Controller, and then that opens a path for you to destroy a fleshy glob maintaining a force field. You would think that the fact that this is split into three very distinct paths would mean that you would thus have three very distinct encounters, but they all play almost identically to one another. All three of them are circular rooms with a Controller floating around, and you break his crystals in order to make him vulnerable to your attacks. It isn't a difficult fight, and it isn't a complicated puzzle, and ultimately just winds up being the exact same thing three times in a row. This happens constantly throughout Interloper, which mostly consists of you sprinting down long conveyor belts and then jumping off of them onto other conveyor belts for about two straight hours.

What burns me most about Black Mesa's Xen, however, is that the entire borderworld has had the personality sucked straight out of it. Xen used to be a Giger-esque hellscape, all bone and speckled carapace. A lot of the level geometry textures were taken straight from reference photos of insects, and it did a great job selling Xen as something of a hive; lots of gross, fleshy, chitinous pockets carved into the walls, pale white and red moving parts that are clearly both artificial and organic. It makes sense, contextually, because the Nihilanth is itself a hybrid of flesh and metal, and the home that it's made of Xen is reflected in its design. Black Mesa's Xen, in its deepest parts, is way more heavy on the machinery angle than the organic one. Through the thick, red haze, it's hard to tell what you're even looking at. The glowing blue lights leading you by the nose sit next to what are very clearly just steel girders and pistons, which is immensely boring when you compare it to the almost-living Xen from two and a half decades ago.

Old Xen's inspirations were obvious, but it still managed to carve an identity out of them. Black Mesa's Xen, on the other hand, looks like fucking everything else.

I want you to look at these two pictures and tell me that they don't look like they were from the same game. I want you to look at this screenshot and tell me that you can't picture the SSV Normandy flying straight through it. I want you to look at this image and tell me that it doesn't look like a Destiny raid map. Whatever identity Xen once had is gone, stripped bare to make it completely indistinct from any photobashed ArtStation "outer space" drawing to be used for padding out a portfolio and nothing else. Originality is both overrated and unimportant, but when you throw out something neat in favor of something bland, I'm going to be hard on it. Gordon Freeman crawls grunting to his feet after going through the Lambda Core teleporter and walks through blue bio-luminescent plants until he sees the Eye of Sauron looking down on him and a woman starts singing over baby's first synthwave.

On that note, Black Mesa has entered itself into the club of Media that Needs to Shut the Fuck Up, given how it starts playing some pretty mediocre tunes from the word go and never ever stops. Music is playing constantly throughout the game, never giving you a single quiet moment or a chance to drink in the layered soundscapes, and it hardly even has the decency to be good most of the time. For every decent pull that fits the action, there are two tracks that clash so hard that they spoil the scene they're in. Blast Pit 3 plays during the sequence in Blast Pit where you have to sneak past the tentacles back up through the missile silo. The incredibly loud, chugging guitars that lead into the How to Compose Dramatic Music For Film tinkling piano keys don't fit the sequence at all. Again and again, these amateurish tracks keep leaching into the game like pesticides into groundwater. The intro to Lambda Core where you uneventfully ride a freight elevator for two minutes is punctuated by steel drums and pounding synths in a moment that should be quiet and introspective; Blast Pit 1 legitimately sounds like a recording of somebody warming up before their actual performance; every single track on Xen inevitably leads into the exact same fucking ethereal female vocals "ooh"ing and "aah"ing over the instrumentation. It wasn't enough for Xen to look like everything else on the market, so all of its songs sound identical to one another, too. It's rough. It's so clearly a collection of just about every thought the composer has ever had in the past two decades, all strung together end to end without much of any consideration as to when it ought to be playing or what ought to even make it into the final game. I can't remember the last time that a game's music annoyed me this much.

Peel away the layers and poke your fingers through the flesh, and Half-Life is still at the core of Black Mesa. Enough of it is still present that playing Black Mesa isn't a completely miserable experience. All it managed to make me feel, however, was that I'd rather just be playing the original instead. Black Mesa can't manage to be anything more than a slipshod imitation of Half-Life, and the moments that it does well are the moments that Valve already did better twenty-five years ago.

Xen was never bad.

Black Mesa keeps shifting between different modes of gameplay–or so-called “pillars”. Black Mesa’s main pillars here would be: puzzling, platforming, shooting, and being a walking simulator, following Half-Life 1’s original tag-line of “Run. Think. Shoot. Live.”. In the narrative context of Black Mesa, this pillar approach does make sense. You are not playing as Mario or Master Chief; you’re a “highly trained professional” scientist caught in a FUBAR situation between aliens and the military. That would be a hard sell if the gameplay focused on either platforming or shooting or puzzling. But what nags me the most is that these pillars all tend to happen in completely separate realities; you’re not doing much platforming or puzzling while shooting, or much puzzling while platforming.

A knock-on effect of keeping these pillars all separate is that it limits what you can do with them individually, since a game can only be so long. A given pillar can never reach its full potential if the game has to distribute its total length between several pillars; time spent on one means there’s less time to spend on the others. We already see the unforeseen consequences of this in Black Mesa: many puzzle or platforming segments being rather toothless, potential enemy compositions never even being tried, and many puzzle types being one-and-done once you move to the next chapter. Sneaking past highly-lethal enemies is only a thing with the tentacles in Blast Pit. Active turrets, tripwire mines or Barnacles rarely appear in major Marine encounters. The more mobile Alien Grunt variants in Xen only appear for about three or four minor encounters. You never get to use the long-jump module in combat against the Marines. The shielded Controllers only appear around five or six times near the very end of the game. Gargantuas are only used for scripted sequences and never as an enemy in regular combat. Bullsquids and Houndeyes rarely appear with the rest of the Xenians. Marine Snipers never appear in regular combat as well. Portals are almost never used within combat encounters. Headcrab Zombies are only used in minor encounters but rarely ever in any major ones. Tanks, helicopters and APCs are rarely utilized as a serious enemy type. Long-jumping in combat is never really tested outside of one boss fight where you use it to circlestrafe faster. The Assassins only appear for a whopping TWO encounters in the whole game.

This gets worse when Black Mesa continues to introduce new elements within each of these pillars, up until the very end of the game. When introducing something new, you generally want to slow the game down a bit to show/tell what the new thing is and/or does. So a security guard tells you the Tentacles in Blast Pit locate you by sound, the Marines are shown in a scripted sequence to be hostile against scientists like you, and you get an antepiece to practice your Long Jump in . Else you risk the player having no clue what they’re supposed to do with the new thing and die several times in confusion, which is rather demotivating. To its credit, Black Mesa is incredibly thorough with making sure that the player knows what it is they’re supposed to do and how something new works. The only issue here is that Black Mesa keeps introducing too much new stuff. If you keep slowing down the game to teach the player something new, there won’t be much room left to test the player’s mastery over most pre-existing elements, which leaves the game feeling like wasted potential. Black Mesa already has the tools to craft interesting combat scenarios or platforming sections or puzzles or combination thereof, but it instead chooses to dazzle you with its quantity and variety rather than the quality of its individual challenges. (At the very least it’s not Half-Life 2 where its gameplay elements and modes of gameplay are so disparate that you couldn’t combine them even if you tried)

Had the core gameplay combined these pillars into one, it could get more mileage out of each one. If your platforming/movement skills would get implicitly tested during combat segments (f.e. because you got the Long Jump Module much earlier on and/or because the combat arenas already involve a lot of platforming), then the platforming-only sections can afford to be more complex and engaging because the player is more familiar with the game’s movement already. If your fourteen weapons also had uses for puzzling and platforming, then the game wouldn’t have to spend as much time slowing down to teach you something new. Then puzzles could be used to teach you new ways to use those weapons in combat, and vice versa. For example, the Gravity Gun in Half-Life 2 isn’t only a puzzle tool, but a useful combat tool as well. The TMD in Singularity and time powers in TimeShift both worked in a way that enabled both interesting combat and puzzle scenarios. Admittedly, Black Mesa’s arsenal doesn’t lend itself that well to puzzles or platforming (perhaps it’s more fair to blame HL1 for that), but the presence of alien weapons and experimental lab weapons in the setting should’ve been a free ticket to do something more interesting in that regard, like Half Life: Opposing Force's Barnacle grappling hook weapon. And hey, it’s not like people were using the Hivehand much for anything else.

But even if Black Mesa had a less scatterbrained design philosophy, it wouldn’t be of much help if it kept the same horrible pacing issues. There are many many parts in Black Mesa well into the mid/late-game that consist of banal filler encounters where you’ll be shooting only one to three Headcrabs/Headcrab Zombies/Houndeyes, even though your arsenal is only getting more imposing over time. Sometimes you’re doing rather rudimentary ‘connect the wire’ puzzles. Other times there’s straight up nothing happening, where you’re walking down empty corridors or slowly crawling down a pipe or vent that serves no compelling narrative or atmospheric purpose (hello, Office Complex). Residue Processing at least has the big industrial vibes of getting caught in the massive underbelly of Black Mesa, even if its swimming and platforming puzzles are milquetoast. The ‘walking simulator’ parts in Anomalous Materials and Questionable Ethics at least serve a narrative purpose (which you can simply sprint past if you’re not interested, unlike some other games or moments in this game that like to lock you in a room until they’re done dumping the story), or if they happen right after a major setpiece where some downtime is well-deserved. The problem here is that Black Mesa completely overdoes this downtime. Xen is by far the worst offender here, combining copious downtime with non-threatening combat and simplistic throwaway puzzles/platforming.

Now, Black Mesa does manage to improve on some of the original setpieces, the Marine fights in particular. The launch pad climax at the end of On A Rail is no longer a small flat square, but a thoughtful arena with islands of cover and health/battery items placed in such a way to encourage aggressive maneuvering instead of camping a corner. The dam battle and Forget About Freeman’s topside fight cleverly use points of no return and liberal item placement to encourage the player to act proactively rather than passively. The lobby battle is also a wonderful addition both gameplay-wise and narrative-wise (with the scientists responding in awe and fear to you killing a whole squad of Marines by yourself, something the original game didn’t acknowledge as well). It’s the usage of item placement in BM’s encounters that’s a definite improvement over the original. HL1 was rather stingy with its supplies (on top of them yielding less depending on the difficulty setting), which meant that in the long-term it usually paid off to play boring and safe. BM is much more liberal with supplies within and outside combat encounters, which means you can afford to play more aggressively as long as you move towards wherever the items are.

Unfortunately, most Marine encounters (particularly those in We’ve Got Hostiles) are rather poor at pulling you into the fight. One reason for that is that you often don't get a good glimpse of a combat space and its layout before the fighting starts. This means that you won’t know what lies ahead or what your options are, which in turn means you’re more likely to play it safe than charge into the unknown. The other reason is that a lot of arenas only have a single entrance, whereupon entering you’re immediately fired at from every angle. When there’s too much suppressive fire ahead and you don’t know what exactly lies ahead, you’re of course going to retreat and take cover unless you want to take tons of damage. But when you end up camping the sole entrance, the enemy has no routes to encircle you and thus invalidate your camping position, nor can they flush you out with grenades (because at an arena entrance you usually have more than enough space to backpedal from incoming grenades). You could solve this by making arenas more circular and adding more entrances, and having enemies only move into an arena when you’re already deep inside. One-way entrances or cul-de-sacs with enemies coming from behind also help with preventing the player from approaching each fight with the same choke point and corner camping strategy. Some arenas do make use of these, but it's not applied as consistently as it should’ve been.

The way that the Marine Grunts are balanced also discourages playing proactively. The Marine Grunts’ hitscan fire is incredibly accurate, which turns most encounters into a damage race or a game of peekaboo. Marines also do not understand the concept of pain or flinching or self-preservation in response to being shot. It’s not uncommon for you and a grunt to dump mags into each other, waiting to see which one’s the first to die. It also used to be in HL1 that if you threw a grenade at grunts, that they wouldn’t even bother firing at you. They would instead run for their lives, letting you pick them off or reposition safely. In Black Mesa this behavior is nowhere as pronounced. They might call out the grenade, but all the AI does is try and shuffle away a bit while continuing to shoot at you. Without ways to mitigate hitscan damage, you shouldn't be surprised when the player decides to play it safe and boring.

As for the alien encounters, they only resemble something decent in Lambda Core. There the game actually leverages alien enemies being able to teleport in (when you’re already deep inside an arena!) at several positions and different vantage points. Then you gotta simultaneously take care of Alien Grunts on the ground, Vortigaunts sniping you from vantage points, Headcrabs/Houndeyes bothering you from below, and Barnacles acting as static obstacles. It’s promising stuff! It helps that compared to HL1 the alien enemies have been rebalanced for the best: the Alien Grunts’ ranged attack no longer has obscene homing, Bullsquids fire a spread of harder-to-dodge arced projectiles rather than a single linear projectile, and Vortigaunts/Houndeyes generally seem to not run around aimlessly after getting shot as they did in HL1. Unfortunately, most prior chapters only use alien enemies in the most basic ways possible, and Lambda Complex ends before it can meaningfully build on these interactions. It also doesn’t help that you get the Gluon Gun in Lambda Core, which is stupidly powerful and lets you trivialize a good part of most enemy encounters there.

In conclusion, Black Mesa could have gotten much more out of itself if it intertwined its pillars rather than keeping them separate. With some tweaking it already has a good foundation, it just needs to stop trying to change the gameplay every half hour. Admittedly it’s more fair to blame HL1 for that considering BM’s limited scope as a remake, but since the BM developers bloated Xen for no good reason other than what I assume is making their art portfolio look more impressive, it shouldn’t have been that impossible.

I also want to take a quick detour to talk about the final boss. The revamped Nihilanth fight comes as a part of a new wave of FPS bosses that I like to call “movement bosses”. Whereas before most FPS bosses had you either circlestrafing them to death (much like the Gonarch in HL1 or BM) or doing some inane puzzle that didn’t rely on testing what you’ve used so far (like Nihilanth in HL1, the Icon of Sin in Doom 2, and most Ugh-Zan fights in the Serious Sam franchise), nowadays developers seem to have somewhat realized that abstract puzzles or circlestrafing don’t make much of an interesting boss fight in an FPS. Now we get bosses with elaborate attack patterns reminiscent of 90’s console action games that you can’t just circlestrafe through (like the Cyberdemon in Doom (2016), General Brand in Serious Sam: Siberian Mayhem, and Nihilanth here). These fare much better because they're challenging you on something that you’ve been doing throughout the entire game (i.e. moving). But while this new wave of FPS bosses has made it more interesting to avoid damage from a boss, they all fail to do so for dealing damage to a boss.

As it is now, dealing damage to a boss is a simple matter of equipping the strongest gun (or the next-strongest gun if you run out of ammo), and then holding down LMB on the boss. In Siberian Mayhem that is your Rocket Launcher, in Doom 2016 it is weapon swapping between multiple guns (which amounts to the same thing since you’re swapping between them for the sake of DPS and not their other properties), and in BM it’s the Gluon Gun. Most of these bosses weakly try to address this by attacking you once in a blue moon with some form of homing projectiles that you can only avoid by shooting them down, but if you are already using a continuous hitscan beam weapon like the Gluon Gun, then these are only brief one-second diversions from lasering the big fetus. There isn’t much of a reason to use your grenades, your Snarks, your mines, your satchel charges, your revolver, your shotgun, your pistol, your crossbow, or your crowbar against Nihilanth, whereas in regular enemy encounters most of them can be of use depending on the situation. If your arsenal is designed around dealing with a large variety of ever-changing situations, then a boss fight should reflect that variety and unpredictability, such as by throwing multiple obstacles of different types at you at once. Designing an FPS boss fight that challenges both avoiding damage and dealing damage would need a shift in paradigm design, which I’ve written about in extensive detail elsewhere.

Eu fiquei com o pé atrás em relação a essa franquia depois de ter zerado a versão clássica do primeiro jogo. Na minha opinião, o jogo tinha envelhecido muito mal, com várias coisas que eu apontei detalhadamente e que me desagradaram como fã de FPS. Enfim, parece que a equipe que fez esse remake sentiu exatamente as mesmas coisas na época, e eles consertaram tudo e ainda adicionaram muito mais conteúdo, tornando o jogo perfeito.

Entre as mudanças, foram implementadas mecânicas novas, novos inimigos, uma nova física com um feedback prazeroso quando nossas armas atingem os inimigos, um salto maior, mais munição para as armas, gráficos mais bonitos e ambientes mais detalhados e amplos. Claramente, eles se inspiraram no Half-Life 2 para fazer essas mudanças.

A maior mudança foi a expansão da campanha, fazendo com que o planeta/dimensão dos aliens ocupasse 50% do tempo de jogo. Isso enriqueceu muito o universo e, por sua vez, a história de Half-Life. O contexto que deram para a raça dos Vortigaunts nesse lugar foi incrível e conseguiram passar tudo aquilo quase sem acrescentar diálogo algum.

Terminando essa review, quero dizer que agora sou realmente fã de Half-Life.

there's reasons why old games can still be better than their modern equivalents despite decades of technological improvements and learning. One of those reasons and the reason why half-life one is still one of the best games ever made is the level design. Proper design is timeless and unfortunately somehow seems to be reverting in modern-day, in my experience. As demand for videogames increases and the market grows larger, developers have to be wary and design their levels in a way that allows every person regardless of videogame experience to enjoy the game and not feel like they get lost often or don't know how to progress. Half-life's solution was to make the game almost entirely linear but still have it feel like a real place. The black mesa facility is so well designed not only from a gameplay sense but from a visual sense that you can completely see how people can go to work there. By having a good balance between a cool location that seems like a real place and subtle linearity that makes it hard to get lost in what would normally be a sprawling, huge science lab that the player has no clue the floor map of, it lets the player have the benefit of feeling like they won't get lost in the area yet still have the ability to see all there is to see in the great facility. Very unique zones and amazing set pieces, which is the first undeniably improved part of black mesa over half life. So many amazing action-packed moments or fun puzzles with an amazing music score that just makes you feel so cool. The set pieces are also amazing because they link perfectly with this games most awesome aspect that hasn't been properly imitated until dark souls: You control how much you interact with the story. You are gordon and you choose how much you care about other people. You can kill every scientist or barney and leave them as bullsquid bait so you get a head start. Or you can play a hero that leads everyone to safety, which would at some points feel like trying to drain the ocean with a straw. It links into the set pieces because you can decide how you see each moment. You can think "Woohoo! I just killed those marines! I am so cool. Alright now I gotta get out of here" or, if you pay attention to the story, "Oh my goodness! The Resonance Cascade, which I inadvertently caused, is self-sustaining! And the military backup that was sent to deal with it is gone! We're on our own! Oh no, they even evacuated all of New Mexico! What a disaster!"
By not forcing the player to feel any kind of remorse or connection with the story outside of the actual player's own choosing, you never get moments like Doom Eternal where doomguy sits down in front of this old guy as he explains the deep lore to him. If I were doomguy, I would turn around and walk away. But I cant do that. Now if some scientist was telling me that "oh you need to go here and do that did you know if you carry this fluid with you to the gonarchs lair you can use it to kill them instantly why don't you try that oh oh oh I'm a scientist nerd" You can walk away because you don't care about the stupid story. I would pay money to be able to walk away from some game stories. Skipping cutscenes and dialogue can only get me so far. All this awesome stuff is why it has such a high rating, and now we come to my two negative points. One: The overall maximum ammo you can carry , your reload speed, and move speed have been lowered from the original. To fit "Modern sensibilities" of what a shooter should be. Yeah if everything were to fit modern sensibilities I wouldn't be playing this shitty medium id move on to another art form like radio dramas or flip books. Obviously this was an attempt to ground the game a little bit and encourage using different weapons, as in the original you could mostly stick to the smg or shotgun or whatever weapon you liked. I'm not totally against this change and it's more balanced because now you can sprint. Not a huge issue more of a preference thing. And the actual issue I have is xen. So for some context, in the original half life xen was godawful. Legit irredeemable terrible. But in this, it's not so bad. It's got better design both visually and gameplay wise but its sooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo loooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooong. So boring. Keeps going on and on and on especially interloper its cool but its just conveyor belts for 90 floors and since its 90 floors your framerate tanks cus it has to render 90 floors and 900 conveyor belts moving 90000 boxes. Jeez. Yeah, if Xen were cut in half this would be a 5 star. Half life is the best and this is just half life with mostly fixed elevators, so hell yeah.

It's been a while since I finished this game, but was cleaning up my backlog here so might as well throw a few thoughts.

This fan remake of the classic pc game Half Life (that I'm sure doesn't need introduction) is a extremely impressive piece of work, considering again, it was made by fans on their free time, and that fact alone is worth praising, although I did pay money for it, so I can't exactly sweep under the rug every flaw just because "it's a fan project".

First, gameplay: this remake, while having the same weapons as the original, still does things very differently from the original. Not only there are new physics based puzzles to take advantage of the source engine, but the gunplay itself feels different from the original, more closely resembling the Half Life 2's gunplay, and the same thing can also apply to the HECU soldier's AI, which also more closely resembles the Combine's AI, although they were made changes to try to bring it more close to the HECUs in the original. Although these changes were not a deal breaker for me, if you preferred HL1's gunplay and AI to a massive degree when compared to HL2, you might not like these changes.

As for the plot, before Xen the game still follows the same plotline as the original game, for the most part, On Rails was very streamlined to be less confusing. And this section of the game has a very nice pace and flow that ultimately culminates in Xen.

Xen... Is weird...
I like the asthetic changes a lot, and the area looks gorgeous (although it does come at a cost of some semi rare frame drops here and there, didn't bother me much but I had to point it out). And even outside of looks many of the gameplay elements are well implemented and fun. Where I start to have an issue with it is when Xen gives you too much of the same good thing. Like seriously it drags SO MUCH, like seriously there's like 5 different puzzles where you have to go to 3 places to activate something and it gets annoying really fast. Although I did take breaks from time to time so that certainly helped (and weirdly enough I ended up enjoying Interloper a lot, even though that's the least popular chapter of the game, and even then I wish they cut down the fat, specially near the end).

So basically, you have a remake that does a lot of stuff right, and some stuff wrong, and although I could say more stuff about this game, I'm writing this late at night and this was supposed to just be some quick thoughts on the game, so yea.

4/5, this is the same rating I would give HL1 if I made a review on it, and while I think this is a pretty good remake, I also recommend playing through the original too, as they are both different games that are both worth checking out.

Eu não joguei o Half-Life original, comecei direto pelo Blackmesa.

No início o jogo me prendeu muito, a atmosfera naquela instalação é muito envolvente e me deixou curioso para saber o que tava acontecendo ali o tempo todo. O gameplay é ótimo e tem várias momentos com muita ação que acontecem sob ótimas músicas.
Uma pena o jogo do meio pro final ficar cansativo, com quebra-cabeças básicos e desinteressantes e inimigos repetitivos (nesse caso dou uma colher de chá, sei que o jogo original é de 1998).
O Xen... meu amigo, que trecho insuportável de chato, eu não via a hora de sair dali ou do jogo acabar, e não sei se eu não prestei atenção, mas tive a sensação de que não agrega muito a história. Enfim, no geral bom jogo e só, não achei tudo aquilo que falam.

This is going to be a little bit of a cynical write-up. I did, admittedly, fall out of the appeal of Half-Life for a while, having used to be a big fan. Not fps as a whole though, I've played countless more and I'm also an avid fan of a lot of walking sims.

Why do I bring up walking sims? Because that's kind of what Black Mesa has made HL1 into for a solid 50% of the runtime. A super strong percentage of what you're doing in the game is navigating level geometry, looking at pretty screensavers, and sometimes music will kick in to give some real emotional weight to the scene, whether that be heartpumping or in awe.

The biggest issue is none of this is that engaging. There are visual delights for sure, but it wears off quickly. You will spend an enormous amount of time walking to hit a switch, or putting an object into an object, dealing with really boring easy encounters every 5-10 minutes along the way. There's not a lot of reason to be engaged, other than maybe nostalgic purposes. This particular problem applies to a little over half the levels, including Xen. I was actually super disappointed in how they made Xen and Interloper massively built around platforming that wasn't interesting and to bring this home, they tried to rip off HL2's dark gravity gun sequence with an infinite ammo Gluon Gun/Tau Cannon as you rise up the biggest encounter in Interloper.

It's just so unfortunate because within a few levels and very very select encounters in other levels there's actually really competent hard hitting design. The ones I'll name drop being Questionable Ethics, Surface Tension, Forget About Freeman, and then some select encounters in Lambda Core and Nihilanth. These encounters don't just throw super strong AI enemies and large amounts of them at once, but they also take place in arenas that effectively use spacing and your general speed (even though they removed bunnyhopping). They were parts I super enjoyed that I found real unfortunate that they decided to shift their focus off that for something that was, compared to others of its genre, very bland.

There is an almost good game under all this monotony and willingness to be a graphical powerhouse journey. Beneath this brandishing of Half-Life 1 as Half-Life 2 there are genuine improvements that could've made a far better fps that may have rivaled the greats. Like one of my favorite changes is they made the Vortigants dodge shots as well as your aim, or how the new modifications to Xen enemies work.

It just never reaches that. It seems content on resting on its laurels of looking beautiful but lacking depth. It's a mixed bag that tries to be a moniker of what people want Half-Life graphically updated to LOOK like, but not what Half Life actually PLAYS like. It almost cynically becomes nostalgic fulfillment, rather than a good fps or walk sim of its own.

That being said, I do still think that I may be a minority here. Maybe what I describe is exactly what you want out of Half-Life, and maybe you haven't played the original at all so you don't know what you're really missing. It does still have its good moments, so I can still somewhat recommend this game. But this isn't a good fps game, it's an alright underbaked immersive sim. (6.5/10)

To preface I have never played the original Half-Life so this was my first jump into this universe and I was intrigued. I enjoyed the beginning of the game and the end of the game but I found the middle of the game quite boring. It felt like there was a lot of padding with the gunfights and fighting the military was just annoying at times. I kept going though as I was enjoying the story being told but there were points where I genuinely wanted to stop.
To give credit where credit is due the late game like I said is quite good. The traversal through Xen is fun and the puzzles are engaging as well as the new enemies it's just sad that by that point I was sort of just waiting for the game to end as I really didn't enjoy the middle section.

All in all, this was a nice game but I feel it could've used some refining but maybe I just didn't get it. Who knows.

I desperately want to rate it higher, but I can't do that in good faith after playing it to completion. I clocked in 22 hours to get all the achievements (two of which in particular add a unique and frustrating challenge to your run, neither of which tanked the score BTW!), this is around 6 or 7 more hours than a normal run of Black Mesa will take. The team from the Crowbar Collective did an excellent job of remaking one of the most beloved FPSs available but there are issues, from minor to moderate, but they stack up and by the end, you will feel it.

First of all, the game is buggy, really buggy. Sometimes a mission-critical item will phase through the world, you will clip out the map, you will get crushed by an object barely touching your hitbox and die instantly, an enemy will be eat all your shots from your favorite high-powered weapon and ignore all the damage until you get much closer to him, it's incredibly easy to sequence break one of the bosses (especially if you are doing achievements that require you to carry items though the fight), while not a bug these also feel like ones: hitboxes of some objects are way bigger than the object, thus they will block your shots when firing from behind them and there are lots of magic walls in places that don't necessarily make sense for it (some block you artificially from going back in the level, and some prevent minor skips which would have been a really cool reward for curious players). All of this creates this feeling of jank, that someone inexperienced in the industry made this, like the game lacks polish that a full release of a game like Half-Life or an official remake made by Valve ought to have.

The second big problem is balancing, what the fuck have they done to the enemies? If you play on normal Vorts, head crabs, zombies, assassins, the majority of the roster is laughable, you can even easily put the final boss because compared to the Marines they are all trash. I'm half considering booting up the original HL to see if they do even a quarter of the damage they do in Black Mesa, they spit out insane DPS, never miss a shot, and need milliseconds of direct line of sight to start firing on you, they even keep firing in the direction they saw you last. Hell, they even keep shooting through walls as if nothing was there, I'm pretty sure it's just a visual bug and those "ghost shots" don't hurt you. This leads to a laughable power gap between them and the rest of the enemy force. The alien grunts don't deal much damage but they tank a lot of shots, in large groups this means wasting a whole lot of ammo. The controllers are kinda whatever, but the devs LOVEEE spawning like 10 of them at a time. Sentry turrets will also make short work of you, but they are quite easy to sneak up on without tripping lasers or walking around in most cases.

The final thing that made me lower the score was the level design. Most of the maps are faithful recreations with some addendums, modifications, etc. Except for Xen which was very much expanded and reimagined. This led to the "Xen" chapter being a vast improvement over the original (for the most part), and the last actual, non-boss chapter, "Interloper", being a mix of great new storytelling additions, models, textures, and locations which are brand new and have never been seen before, some really cool scenes, and some of the worst gameplay in the entire game. This leaves a SERIOUSLY sour taste in your mouth because the last 1-3 hours are stacked with uninspired puzzles, elevator fights, THE DAMNED CONVEYOR BELTS, and fight after fight after fight after fight after fight after fight after fight. Why the fuck did they not put some of the fights in-between all the cable management puzzles and jumping over lasers and instead stacked it all on that stupid conveyor belt and elevator ride? I don't fucking know!

I wanted to focus on the negative aspects because other reviews have already covered the good parts: the game looks gorgeous, all the sections in Black Mesa where marines are absent are fucking perfect, Xen in REALLY gorgeous, etc etc.

What a joke! I cannot comprehend how the developers so clearly have a sincere passion for Half-Life while simultaneously not understanding in the slightest what makes Half-Life what it is.

My disillusionment with the game set in the instant that I got into my first encounter with the HECU, who are so unbelievably obnoxious and focused on trial-and-error that the game stops for 30 minutes at a time every time you encounter them. Of course, this wouldn't be such a bad thing if they weren't the overwhelming majority in terms of enemy placement; once you first encounter a Marine the (genuinely very good) alien-fighting gunplay is sidelined up until you reach the very depths of the Lambda complex.

The HECU (while also obnoxiously and artificially difficult) are representative of Black Mesa's biggest flaw, and the most dire manner in which it fails to recreate what Half-Life is all about: rather than encouraging exploration, innovation and improvisation like every Half-Life game does, you're regulated to kneeling behind cover and using some of the most boring weapons in the game (namely the MP5 and shotgun) as you attempt to pick them off from a distance. Even the flow of using these weapons is neutered when compared to the original game, due to the MP5's magazine capacity, ammunition reserves and grenade stock being reduced to mere fractions of what they were, meaning that you can't even truly indulge in bombast without having to stop and reload or scavenge for ammo every minute or so. This problem also impacts the revolver and crossbow, genuinely fun weapons that lend themselves well to the long-distance based combat of the HECU: you're reduced to a measly three-or-two magazines in reserve for both of them, meaning you can carry a maximum of twenty-four and fifteen rounds apiece for them. I don't know if they were going for realism here or what, but tell me, do you play Half-Life for realistic portrayals of combat?

The gunplay is not alone in being completely representative of Black Mesa's disdain for exploration and player creativity: there are invisible walls and cheap mapping practices everywhere, determined to stomp out Half-Life's signature feeling of "what's up there? I wonder if I can get up there" at every possible corner. Some of my favorite examples were long-jumping off a floating island in Xen to land on one situated below, only to find that the developers had registered all long falls in Xen as falling into a bottomless pit and would force a reload upon landing... and feeling quite clever when I used satchel charges to bypass an explosive maze only to find that the map was designed to blow you up if the explosives blew up regardless of where you were on the map, even if you were well behind cover.

Speaking of Xen...! I don't know, it's beautiful and impressive and perhaps a step up from the original's from a certain perspective, but it's also not really anything we haven't seen before in a million other alien worlds from a million other science fiction stories. The Xen of Half-Life felt genuinely strange, incomprehensible and uncanny in a manner that not only acted in favor of the game's horror elements but also reinforced the notion that you are not welcome here, that this world was never meant for and never intended to pay host to those of your kind. Sure, we're treated to beautiful forests, swamps and factories, but... they're just that, things that I recognize, things that I've seen before, things that are familiar. It takes the alien out of "alien invasion."

Another thing that bothered me was the music. None of it was bad, I'd say, but none of it really felt like Half-Life to me. Half-Life's OST was dominated more than anything by droning guitar feedback, dark ambient soundscapes and industrial rhythms, the prevalence of which makes the heavy synths and pounding drums that much more impactful when they do show up. Not only does the Black Mesa OST sound much more like something you'd hear in a standard fare sci-fi FPS of the 2010s, it was more or less one Epic Videogame Song With Heavy Drum And Guitar And Synth after another - sometimes it worked for the moment (such as We've Got Hostiles, whose almost desert rock-styled riffage fit perfectly for the adrenaline rush of seeing the surface for the first time only amid a massive firefight) but most of the time I mostly either found the loud music irritating when it played during something as innocuous as exploring a reactor facility, or when I had to listen to it again, and again, and again as I reloaded save after save after save in one of the game's million-and-a-half HECU skirmishes.

It's a shame, because as I said in my intro it's clear that these developers love Half-Life. There's a lot of thought put into capturing the idiosyncrasies of 1998's portrayal of Black Mesa while also making them feel more lively and lived-in from a modern point of view. The moment-to-moment combat and "gun feel" is excellent when you're just fighting aliens, and the flow of the levels themselves is quick, breezy and natural... but because it all goes to hell whenever you get to Xen (the only completely original section of Black Mesa) it's clear that we can give credit to the fact that these are painstaking bit-for-bit recreations of Valve's innovations as opposed to something that the team can truly take credit for. Xen literally milks the same puzzle over and over and over again for the entirety of its 8-10 hour playtime, and only really bothers to introduce its trump card (which in fairness is cool as hell) during the last quarter of Interloper.

The Nihilanth fight, though? That shit fuckin' rules. It's just a shame that the game only finally realizes its potential during the literal final moments of the game.

Played on "hard" (eventually got so fed up with the very first tank fight and the Gonarch fight that I set it to normal until I'd killed those), completed in about 28 hours.

Fully remaking a game is one of the most arduous tasks a developer can attempt, it requires a complete and total understanding of the original game's design in all aspects, from art to gameplay to audio, the works. In that regard there are plenty of aspects where Black Mesa succeeds - it's clear that the team at Crowbar Collective loves the original game and by extension the franchise, visually it's nothing short of gorgeous - there's always a unique detail to be found in every little corner, and the environmental storytelling has been expanded greatly to the game's benefit, I often found myself in awe watching events unfold throughout the game's many locales, infatuated with all the tiny things they sprinkled throughout every level. From the brand new HECU dialogue, which helps to humanize them more, to the Vortigaunts in Interloper, Black Mesa does an - and I cannot stress this enough, excellent job at contextualizing the original and even it's sequel, while offering it's own new twists that don't feel out of place at all.


Where Black Mesa misses the mark for me, however are in it's gameplay additions. I can't bring myself to be too harsh on it, because it's really impressive stuff, but it's very clear which areas were new / completely redone and which ones weren't based on how they play alone. The most common issue with these new segments is that their level design is at odds with the enemy design, these areas are expanded immensely in a way that seems like it wants to be played it wants you to constantly be moving from cover to cover, yet the enemy AI conflicts with this philosophy, they are by all intents and purposes slightly modified Half-Life 2 soldiers, and as such their main plan is to attempt to ambush you, which obviously doesn't work in these huge open arenas, so instead they just run straight at you directly. The result is a very sloppy, headache inducing gameplay loop that revolves around having to cower behind any cover you can find until the next soldier comes in your line of sight for you to shoot. The original game rewarded precise, tactical play, anticipating your enemies and making the best use of both your weapons and your environment to clear every combat encounter as perfect as possible within that given moment. Black Mesa rewards inactivity and mindlessly unloading on your enemies. Maybe I'm missing something - feel free to contest, but I tried, I really did try to approach the game's gunplay in different ways, and yet I found this was the only way to get through battles smoothly.

It stings because the less altered, smaller areas have good, even great gunplay most of the time. But when in the midst of the new stuff, the cracks within the design really begin to show. I don't want to herald HL1 as some unbeatable, almighty saint, because it isn't, nor do I really want to directly compare the two games, because they are different experiences, I appreciate what Black Mesa adds, but there's a clear disconnect between what made that game so fun in the first place and how Crowbar Collective approaches it. I feel like the designers themselves were aware of the flaws in the AI, because infighting and stealth has been killed off almost entirely, save for some scripted sequences, and they've been split up in a manner in which the enemies are less varied and less interactive with others, making fighting them often feel like a slog.

That general feeling of things dragging on for too long unfortunately leaks into the level design aswell, a lot of the redone areas are there for you to gush about (and yeah, the game's pretty.) but these kinds of changes are overabundant throughout the game and don't do much to justify themselves. Old portions of levels have been also been tinkered with in such a manner in which you now dance around the primary objective doing more arbitrary things for no discernible reason - in Lambda Core for example, instead of simply flicking a switch to turn on each pump and then leaving, you now have to first open the drainage door, ride an elevator to the top of the room, and then turn on the pump, all the while having to deal with Vortigaunts obnoxiously teleporting in. Depending on who you ask, this might be a positive addition, but to me it kills the pacing. Sometimes these modifications can be for the better, Questionable Ethics is legitimately fantastic and I much prefer this version's iteration of On A Rail. But most of the time, it feels like they just don't know when to stop. Surface Tension & Forget About Freeman have had some of it's most interesting sequences removed in favour for large, repetitive arena brawls. Residue Processing removes the (pretty bad) conveyor puzzles, but in the process of trying to "fix" makes a lot of the same platforming mistakes with it's replacement sections. Power Up is slightly restructured in a way that sounds like an upgrade but in execution circumvents a lot of the improvements it tries to make by having to dial down the HECU ambushes, which I feel like removed a lot of what was special about that chapter. But the worst offender?


Xen. The borderworld was overhauled almost entirely, and it shows, because it's Black Mesa's worst encapsulated within an agonizing 4 hours. It starts off great, you are treated to the beautiful scenery, get to explore deteriorating research sites, the puzzles are pretty decent... but it doesn't stop. Once you have gone through the first 30 minutes of Xen you have essentially experienced everything that chapter has to offer. The other hour consists of literally the same exact thing until you finally reach the end. Reach big room, find blocked passageway, find way to open blocked passageway, continue. Obviously they wanted to make Xen a much longer and more complete experience, but they did so in the worst way possible - repetition. But whatever, it's bearable. This same pattern continues into Gonarch's Lair, a lot of it is now running away from the Gonarch and occasionally fighting it for about thirty or so minutes until you make your way to the end where you're able to kill it. It drags, but at least up until to this point it's been somewhat entertaining. What comes next though, I cannot excuse. Interloper is nearly two hours of rotating between the same plug puzzles, tower climbing, and factory sections. Not only that, but it essentially kicks the combat away in favor of using the gluon gun to dispatch annoying swarms of Xen wildlife. I assume it wants to be a power trip like that of Half-Life 2's citadel segment, this becomes apparent in a final ascension part where, in a last struggle you fight off hordes of alien controllers, but it is so excruciatingly mundane that I probably wouldn't have finished the game if I wasn't such a big fan of the series in the first place. I don't want to let this chapter alone heavily affect my thoughts with the game, but by the end of it I was definitely feeling soured.

Nihilanth... is pretty good actually. Way better than the original's fight, I like the touch of the science team teleporting supply canisters and cover spots to you. Easily the best part of Xen, even if it is short, but that's exactly it. None of the other chapters or additions in general should be that long, they're purely just lengthy for the sake of it. There is so much fluff and padding suffocating what should be a fantastic remake, but Black Mesa just keeps burying itself in a plethora of unwise design choices and seems blind to it's own failures as a game. I have an immense amount of respect for the people behind this game, and it certainly is deserving of being sold as a commercial product. The game is almost universally acclaimed, and for a solid reason - it is without a doubt one of, if not the single most impressive fanwork ever made. But I just... can't get behind it.


Sometimes, less is more.

black mesa flip-flops between wanting to stay beholden to the original game with newer technology and re-contextualization from prior half-life games, and just completely putting a spin on HL1 - but the latter tends to present itself as the game's way, way weaker moments and it absolutely cannot be more frustrating how much they hold they hold this game back.

i can, at least, sing praises for how jaw-droppingly gorgeous black mesa is, especially given the use of the source 1 engine, in addition to just how masterfully the tragedy of the black mesa incident is shown. HL1 had already done a great job in that regard, but BM takes it to another level - extra dialogue, variations of scientists and security guards and added detail to every map make it feel much more like a real workplace, and the absolute tide-turner that are the surface chapters encompass the absolute stress and overwhelming despair of those who didn't make it during the HECU's last stand and eventual retreat so damn well through the soundtrack, setpieces and wonderfully acted radio transmissions blaring various marines' desperate pleas for help and last words. there's a section in around surface tension that really gets me - where a lone marine, echo-3 juliet, weakily calls out on the radio after his team gets ambushed by alien soldiers mortally wounds him. unable to heal himself, he ends up succumbing to his wounds over the radio.
it's little things like that which can go a long way to illustrate how majorly fucked up the black mesa incident was - an otherwise normal workday gone completely awry, dooming many people only trying to survive. HL2's looming presence also benefits the game greatly in this regard, with characters like eli and kleiner retroactively and seamlessly being integrated into the opening chapter, and also as you overhear emergency alerts progress further and further in urgency, to a point where the president orders a total evacuation of new mexico - foreshadowing HL2's threat of the resonance cascade being much, much worse than just a hostile takeover of black mesa.

the fun stops when black mesa isn't riding off HL1's coattails. for starters, multiple maps force you into routes completely different from the original game with the original sections barricaded for seemingly no reason - these tend to take FAR too much longer than the original level design and really just waste far more time
several puzzles and other sections have been significantly dumbed down which as a whole makes them far less uninteresting (and somewhat abandons the "think" in "run, shoot, think, live") - the entire vent maze in "we've got hostiles" is gone, the tripmines in surface tension are completely visible which eliminates you needing to clear them out and turns it into awkwardly tip-toeing around them (and praying you don't activate their hitboxes anyway - by the way, the surrounding areas with enemy encounters, including the helicopter are also completely gone), and on a rail's maze-like level design is now a pathetic straight shot because people kept complaining about it in the original game
the HECU are abominably more retarded compared to their HL1 counterparts - i'm pretty sure their AI is based off the combine soliders from HL2 and it shows in how crazily omnipotent they are, reducing most chances for you to sneak your way around enemy encounters like you originally could to make up for their brilliant strategy of "get directly into freeman's line of fire" - though this at the very least tends to be somewhat alleviated with the map design.

and then there's xen.

what the fuck happened here?
i think it's already one thing to completely turn xen's barely hospitable, logic-defying, foreboding wasteland into this pretty, serene, teeming-with-beautiful-life alien planet-looking area, and is it pretty? yeah, admittedly, it's one of the best looking maps i've seen in the source engine, but xen is supposed to be an interdimensional train station hurriedly converted into something the nihilanth's troops could live in. "oh but it's just a different interpretation" isn't an excuse - you might as well have sent freeman to an alien planet with BM's take on it.
that having been said, it wouldn't actually sour my opinion on BM's take on xen all that much if it wasn't dramatically worse than the original game's area in terms of level design.
for some reason, crowbar collective thought it wise to comically extend the playtime of HL1's most scorned chapters in an attempt to.. address those complaints? interloper alone can take up to a whopping two hours of basic-yet-repetitive "insert plug into socket" puzzles and visually aggressive combat sequences compared to the original's relatively short platforming sections. you're no longer turning the hunter gonarch into the hunted, you're now spending an hour running away from the damn thing before you tackle it head-on one last time. i don't understand why the devs decided xen needed to be this much longer - nobody does, really!

crowbar collective's ambitions end up souring the game at multiple points, and while i can't fault them for being passionate about the franchise and wanting to one-up half-life source by giving HL1 the remake it truly deserves, i can fault them for misunderstanding many things which make HL1 so good. the airtight pacing, the brain-scratching puzzles, the tense combat sections - black mesa is not a bad game by any stretch of the imagination and i love a lot of when it does for HL1 storytelling-wise, but unless it's directly borrowing from valve's work, those three core values of HL1's gameplay really aren't done the service they truly deserve.

Tentei jogar o primeiro half-life alguns anos atrás e achei bem feião, então em 2020 lançaram Black Mesa e eu finalmente joguei esse remake feito pela comunidade de fãs. E realmente da pra ver a paixão que colocaram no projeto, mesmo os momentos que foram completamente alterados parecem carregar o design da Valve.

O remake está lindo, e consegue passar muito da sensação de estar jogando algo atual feito pela mesma equipe do original. Até a nova trilha sonora parece algo que estaria na versão original, tem a exata mesma vibe.

O único problema na minha opinião, e que persiste desde o primeiro jogo é o contraste dos últimos capítulos com os primeiros, gosto muito mais da vibe dos primeiros, e essa inconsistência incomoda um pouco.

ENG: I want to start by saying that I am not in favor of the idea of remakes, be it in videogames, movies, or whatever. This is because, in most cases, they seem to me to be simple attempts to take money from people under the excuse that the old is obsolete. It is useless. It is not worth it. Better to see something new. In a decade it will be obsolete again. But what can you do? And so on. However, I don't think all remakes are inherently bad. Not at all. If the bases, the essence, the soul of the original work are respected, there is no doubt that something good can come out of it. Even more successful than the original.

That is the case of Black Mesa.

This game, first and foremost, expands on what has already been built. It respects the things Half-Life did well and isn't afraid to change the things that don't work so well. Mostly chapters like On a Rail and, obviously, the infamous Xen. It also fixes retro-continuity errors with the characters. Connecting much better with Half-Life 2. It makes use of the possibilities of the Source engine adding new puzzles. And if we talk about the artistic section (not to be confused with the graphics) this game takes all the plaudits. I'm not implying in any way that the original has a bad one. Just that this remake recreates it in a spectacular way. Being more gloomy and gloomy. With its own charm. In short, I think that's what it is, having its own charm. What I mean is, if a remake doesn't have something of its own, something new to contribute or say to the original work, why does it even exist?

A while back I heard a guy say something along the lines of, "Whatever the purists say, Black Mesa is the way to play Half-Life."

Needless to say, I completely disagree.

Play the original. Which is still, and always will be, a great game that knows what it is and what it wants to do. Despite certain flaws with its length and ending parts. Also play Black Mesa. Which knows what Half-Life always is, was and will be.

ESP: Quiero empezar diciendo que no soy afín a la idea de los remakes ya sea en los videojuegos, películas, o lo que fuere. Esto ya que, en la mayoría de los casos, me parecen simples intentos de sacarle plata a la gente bajo la excusa de que lo viejo es obsoleto. No sirve. No vale la pena. Mejor ver algo nuevo. Que en una década será nuevamente obsoleto. Pero que se le va a hacer... Y así sucesivamente. Sin embargo, no creo que todos los remakes sean inherentemente malos. Para nada. Si se respetan las bases, la esencia, el alma de la obra original, no cabe duda que puede salir algo bueno. Incluso más logrado que lo original.

Ese es el caso de Black Mesa.

Este juego, ante todo, amplia sobre lo ya construido. Respeta las cosas que hizo bien Half-Life y no tiene miedo de cambiar las que no funcionan tanto. Más que nada capítulos como On a Rail y, obviamente, el infame Xen. También arregla errores de retrocontinuidad con los personajes. Conectando mucho mejor con Half-Life 2. Hace uso de las posibilidades del motor Source añadiendo nuevos puzzles. Y si hablamos del apartado artístico (no confundir con los gráficos) este juego se lleva todos los aplausos. No insinúo de ningún modo que el original tenga uno malo. Solo que el de este remake lo recrea de una forma espectacular. Siendo más tétrico y lúgubre. Con su propio encanto. En definitiva, yo creo que es eso, tener su propio encanto. Lo que quiero decir es que, si un remake no tiene algo suyo, algo nuevo para aportar o decir para la obra original, ¿para que si quiera existe?

Hace un tiempo escuché a un tipo decir algo tal que así: "Digan lo que digan los puristas, Black Mesa es la forma de jugar Half-Life"

No hace falta decir que estoy en completo desacuerdo.

Jueguen al original. Que sigue siendo, y siempre lo va a ser, un gran juego que sabe lo que es y lo que quiere hacer. A pesar de ciertas fallas con su duración y partes finales. También jueguen Black Mesa. Que sabe lo que siempre es, fue y será Half-Life.

Black Mesa is a wonderful ride that serves as the intersection between a remake and a reimagining of the 1998 FPS classic Half-Life, and even if it unexpectedly falls apart in the last couple of levels, it shows a passionate modern refreshening that some may consider the best way to experience Half-Life 1.

Seeing that this game was born out of the disappointment of Valve’s “Half-Life: Source”, their official “remake” of Half-Life 1 onto the Source engine, was inspiring. The knowledge that both this game and that game run on the same engine is a beautiful testament to how legendary the Source engine is. Its bounds are once again pushed further and further with the visuals in this game, with incredible color, lighting, and all in all a pretty spectacular graphical update that not only majorly modernizes the visuals but also stays true to the original art style. Gunshots light up surrounding walls, green toxic waste lights up dangerous abandoned rooms, sunlight lights up New Mexican sandstone formations, celestial bodies light up giant orange alien crystals, and this game lights up my eyes and heart because every second of it is a complete visual treat. Every single level has its own theme, palette, and motifs in terms of visuals. The game also gains a brand new dimension due to the physics and enemy AI abiding by Source rather than GoldSrc, allowing the ability for completely different gunfights, new puzzles, and new ways of progression. Enemies shoot at your last known location while successfully evading them, zombies can knock around loose items at you, and you can carry over that one spare energy cell into the next room in case you need it later on. In some respects, it feels like some of the physics have been reworked as well, due to me noticing how bodies drop differently. For reference, I role-played as a vengeful Gordon Freeman who killed all of his fellow scientists and guards. I killed every person that the game allows you/gives you the chance to kill, so save the one injured guard helping you out in Power Up as well as everyone in the final Lambda complex lab.

How Black Mesa reimagines a lot of aspects of the original game is not only cool but admirable and shows integrity, admitting that, despite the obviousness of the devs being giant fans, the original game has its problems and they try to find ways to replace and/or repair them, though it made me sad to know that this Gordon Freeman did not run around the facility and saving the world(s) with a little ponytail on the back of his head, as one of the guards early on reacts to you having cut your hair. On A Rail was completely remixed to change what is a famous low point of the original game, and as I’ll describe in detail, Xen was completely changed. Not all the changes are for the better though, as some of the levels kinda feel disconnected from the original game. Questionable Ethics as a whole could come right out of F.E.A.R. with the military confrontations in dark office hallways, just forget the sketchy little girl. What this game excels at, which is what I’ll point to several times here, lies in how it tries to tether itself to rules, story beats, and style found in Half-Life 2 (aside from the Source engine) without feeling like it’s attempting to homogenize. After all this, Black Mesa still feels like its own separate game and, if it were the original, Half-Life 2 would still be a decently different sequel that tries a lot of new things. Black Mesa doesn’t set itself in eastern Europe or anything. But for example, Kleiner and Eli are now actual characters in the game rather than them ambiguously existing somewhere in the game. I like to think that all the empty/half-empty HEV chargers scattered around the facility are them with their own HEV suits escaping the premises. Through stuff like this, there’s a lot of really cool visual storytelling as well. There are times where we can see situations that enemies like the Vortigaunts and HECU got themselves into that resulted in their demise.

Xen and the following chapters got a complete refurbishing from the original game. What was once effectively Half Life’s endgame with one real, full-ish level has been turned into a complete double-feature-length expedition through the universe’s most gorgeous borderworld. And…I have a complaint that might be a bit controversial as well as a bit silly. I don’t think anyone’s complaining about how Xen looks in Black Mesa because it is visual euphoria and head-scratchingly impressive for the Source engine. But… I don’t think it reflects how Xen felt in the original game. Half-Life 1998 had the world feel cold, foreign, and inhospitable, and in this game, we have what is effectively Avatar’s Pandora but even prettier. It’s not very inhospitable due to me wanting to sit down anywhere and take a nap under the beautiful galaxies. But I do suppose it reflects this idea of having ecosystems that the research teams wanted to study, as the Half-Life 1 Xen feels way more barren. If we’re also continuing with “fixing Valve’s wrongs” or at least trying something new, it also makes you feel like you are invading someone else’s home a lot more than Half-Life’s Xen being The Bad Place Where The Bad Guyz Live, now not just being reflected in the level title "Interloper". From this, I do prefer how this game reinvents what the researchers were doing on Xen, taking a few spare dead bodies wearing HEV suits from the original game and implementing entire overrun outposts to progress through, adding a super cool new enemy with the HEV zombies, with some fucking amazing sound design very reminiscent of the HL2 episodes’ Zombine.

The real main event of the final few levels is the Gonarch. What was essentially a pretty simple but passable boss battle in the original has been forged into what I genuinely believe to be one of the greatest boss battles of all time and a perfect reinvention, and I could honestly write a whole review on it alone. The original battle which was drawn out a bit at times has been reforged into an entire level charting a three-part battle, pushed into mastery with some stunning locales, incredible music, and surprising characterization. The Gonarch now feels like a character, this titanic and furious alien fervent with anger and revenge. The way the game frames it is that she is (one of) the creatures that make headcrabs, and she’s ready to exact vengeance over the countless amount of her children you’ve killed. After a fast-paced and fun first encounter, she escapes, and the level has Gordon ducking through caves, cliffs, alcoves, and submerged tunnels, escaping the Gonarch side-stepping him at every turn, while the game capitalizes on more and more chances to show off the fauna and flora of Xen. All the while, Joel Nielsen gets to have some amazing fun on the soundtrack with climactic synths and drums, building up the importance and tension of the situation to insane levels. And finally, the game comes to a final encounter with the Gonarch in a dimly lit pit, throwing everything she has left at you, as she stays passionate about your demise even when some of her legs stop working. And when you finally kill her, it feels almost tragic as you slaughtered a mother who cared about her children. As for the boss mechanics itself, it’s pretty simple, just shoot rockets at the giant ballsack until she retreats or dies. It’s simple but effective and serves as a good canvas for all the amazing stuff the level gets into. Undoubtedly my favorite part of the game.

This is very unfortunately chased by the level Interloper. It starts and progresses as pretty innocuous and “fine”, offering allyship with the Vortigaunts that gives way to some okay platforming and puzzles, but through the second half divulges into complete garbage. The section where you’re forced to withstand infinite fire from the floaters, alien grunts they can infinitely spawn, and Vortigaunts while hopping through conveyor belts where falling to your death is as easy as getting crushed by one of the giant alien boxes, was some surprisingly terrible game design, despite the rest of Crowbar Collective’s original content in the remake being all pretty good. Parts of the chapter stitched together could’ve served as a cooldown after the climactic Gonarch level and a leadup to the BBEG (even just, like, the first half of the level), but all its tedium and poor design beat out the somewhat-arduous Surface Tension to make it both the worst level in the game and an irreparable stain on the otherwise good third act of the game.

Despite Interloper ending on a good note, it’s followed up by a final boss in Nihilanth, and in terms of the quality of the Gonarch, it’s night and day. The mechanics are confusing, the damage Nihilanth does is super inconsistent (he’s either doing 1 damage or 100 in a hit, no in between), the arena is both dark and inconsistent, with small hills and bumps blocking easy ability to dodge his attacks. For all the dreadful posturing he’s done since you entered the world with some fantastic voice acting, the fight really can’t match what I was hoping for. And no music? Really? For this last final push? Shame. It’s all tied together with G-Man’s iconic epilogue, and…man, I am sorry for saying this, but…the G-Man impressionist in Hunt Down The Freeman was much better. Black Mesa’s G-Man wasn’t awful, it’s a pretty decent evocation of his tone, but the stuttering and impediment are way too exaggerated, and disrupt an otherwise good reimagining of the ending sequence.

On this point, the voice acting, in general, was good. Unlike G-Man, the V/As playing Kleiner and Eli both did a pretty good impersonation, as well as the newer Vortigaunt lines (that weren’t reused from HL2 and its episodes) being good. The supporting scientists and guards are also all good. The only other complaint is that some of the zombie vocalizations are a little goofy.

The soundtrack, composed by Joel Nielsen, is very good overall. It was by the end that I started to understand that the aim here was to not follow up on and/or abide by Kelly Bailey’s original score but to update the game for a newer mood, and even when there are a few tracks that nicely emulate Bailey, I felt a bit bad for judging them on this standard. My only problem is that some tracks feel like they delve into generic “sci-fi” instrumentation which gets me a little removed, standing as neither memorable nor externally enjoyable. As I said, Nielsen has a ton of fun with the Xen soundtracks, but parts of it kind of hit this problem, even though there are some great motifs introduced there. One of the best tracks is undoubtedly what directly follows the Resonance Cascade, amping up the tragedy to 11.

The game in terms of difficulty is not just a bell curve, but a bell. I beat the game on Hard, and starting up, it was somewhat perfunctory, with the only real enemies proving harmful being the Bullsquids, being able to pump you full of poison if you get too close, as well as the Vortiguants, which I’ll also mention that their added voice lines more consistent to their HL2 tonality make the game’s encouragement to attack and kill them a bit sadder knowing of their future allyship. So, the game is pretty mild on Hard, up until HECU shows up. These guys are pretty ravenous on Hard, all of their shots pack a tough punch and you’re required to approach any encounters with them with either extreme precision, caution, or cheesiness. This turns any time you see them into an anxiety-pushing situation where the game forces you into determination to outdo them, whether via marksmanship or arsenal. I don’t mean to imply this is strictly a good thing, it's not, as this can create some whiplash in parts of the game that are otherwise going for something else. The couple encounters with Black Ops are also rife with paranoia unless you can find a dependable way to cheese them. One of them featured some other red lights around the arena so it gets super pareidolic and hallucinatory when you look for Black Ops’ glowing red goggles, the only thing they’re visible by. You trudge through hordes of HECU in the (in my opinion) tedious Surface Tension, you fight off the last remains of them in Forget About Freeman, and then you get to Lambda Core, and…it’s over. The game’s heightened difficulty has stopped. All the Xen forces can feel a bit overwhelming at times, and the Alien Grunts can fuck you up very easily both on Earth and Xen, but none of it feels purely stressful or dreadful, not packing that same venom as HECU.

Overall, I had a ton of fun with Black Mesa, and even if the last stretch can leave a bad taste in your mouth after beating it, it’s not enough to ignore the passionate, wonderful reinterpretations of a legendary game.