it's cool, yeah; this represents an absurd amount of work and love and it's great something like this exists, it's miraculous, even, and i have extreme respect for all the work put into this, but...did we really need a half life remake? black mesa "improves" upon the things people don't like about half life (on a rail is shorter, xen is different entirely, and--most importantly!!--it's way harder to kill yourself by launching off a ladder at top speed) but of all black mesa's changes, the parts i liked the most were...the parts that were just "from half life." which i'm not sure speaks very well to the urgency of its remake. still: half life is great, and black mesa merely in imitating it becomes great, too, even as i don't like all of the changes, or maybe even most of them. (this also felt easier than half life, but that might entirely be because, well, i just replayed half life, and the aforementioned ladder thing, which was responsible for like 20% of my deaths in half life.) i wish this was something even more liberated from half life, instead of these big expansive "new parts" jutting out of the old game's skeleton. that would've made it a worse game, almost definitely, but at least then it might have been interesting. as it stands now: i think i prefer half life, and it takes up 2% of black mesa's hard drive space.

maybe i should finally play half life 2 now, ha ha

i never grew up with half life 1, i kinda skipped it and went immediately into half life 2
when i realized half life 1 existed i went back and tried to play it but it was just too janky (partially because i played the source version) and too dated for my GameCube brain to enjoy
so when i heard of black mesa i thought "this is what ive been waiting for" and oh boy was it worth it
the only downside to this game is that its not an official valve game its a fan creation
which maybe is a good thing since it means they could go all out in appealing to fans without worrying about affecting the actual half life story and whatnot
but its still sad because this remake deserves to be an official half life game

It's amazing to see a fan project like this be made and somehow surpass the original in almost every way.

This game I'd say is up to there with Half-Life 2 in terms of just sheer quality, this game is a triumph for both the creations of the game; but as a message to the games industry, showing fan games can sometimes be better the actual product it's homogeneous.

TAKE NOTES NINTENDO YOU GREDDY FUCKS.

I enjoyed this game a lot, and I think if I ever plan on revisiting the original Half-Life, it will be through this. It's a more streamlined version of a classic updated to make each environment more distinct than the uniform feeling of the labs in the original. I would have rated this higher, but by the time I got to Xen, I was ready for the game to ramp up to a conclusion that took too long to come. Xen was full of cool ideas, but it almost felt like I finished the game when I jumped through the portal, and then still had to play a second game to get to the ending.

This is a really impressive remake, and one of the most impressive fan works I've ever seen from a production values standpoint. It does a really good job updating Half Life 1's level design, gameplay, and presentation to modern (aka HL2) standards, although sometimes the dated design of the original does still show through. Surface Tension is still too long and too combat-heavy, and the Lambda Complex teleporter maze is still extremely annoying. But otherwise it's generally real good. Most of it has a nice balance between being faithful to the original, and adding cool new stuff. It does feel like they tried to amp up the horror elements a bit, and they use lighting really well in service of that too.

And then there's the expanded Xen section, which has been massively reimagined and now takes up maybe 1/4th of the game time. In the original Xen was short, kinda empty, and fairly annoying. In Black Mesa, Xen is probably the best part of the game! It is extremely gorgeous, full of really cool and varied level design, some really neat setpieces, some interesting puzzles. Its very well paced. The atmosphere of it and how it builds the illusion of a whole alien ecosystem existing outside of just what you see heavily reminded me of Metroid Prime, and that is high praise from me.

So: the remake of HL1 is real impressive, but the original Xen section is absolutely excellent.

A pretty great re-imagining of the 1998 original that I would definitely say is a must-play if you've at least played the original.

It does suffer from some similar sins as Half-Life 2, most notably being the over-reliance on physics puzzles, some of the redesigned areas for 1.5 just feel cluttered, unnecessary, or less clear than the original, and the Grunt AI just isn't as engaging or varied as it was originally, with them now basically just being Combine reskins with minor differences.

That being said, it still improves upon the original in the right places, with the biggest outlier being the Xen chapters. They are far better, though Interloper is still a a hit or miss. That chapter is just doomed to be bad I guess.

Again, play the original 1998 PC version before this. It's on Steam, goes on sale often for like a dollar, and it supports modern PCs out of the box.