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.

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.

An impressively constructeed remake that contains all the delights the Source engine brings, yet with its new additions still leaves parts to be desired. The puzzles stand out as some of the most engaging I've experienced in a title like this and the game honestly looks superb for a Source engine game. Soundtrack also goes crazy, seriously makes a lot of otherwise "whatever" moments feel more impactful.

I'd say the first half of the game within Black Mesa is the strongest part of the game, as well as the intro of Xen, but as the game goes deeper in it begins to crack with monotony lining each of the levels, especially in the new Xen. While the puzzles are still quality, they become repetitive in structure and goal and by the end it feels kind of mindless.

It's a cool game but doesn't have all the extra oomph that Half Life 2 has with its story and gameplay, even as the remake aims to push a similar envelope in what the Source engine can do. It's still a decent game but not one that maximised its potential in creating Xen a much more unique world that separates itself from the somewhat mundane reality of Earth and its technologies.

The original Half-Life game has always been one of my favorite FPS games (potentially my favorite single player FPS unless you want to count Portal 2), so of course I was definitely interested in Black Mesa as a remake of the game, and on that note... yeah Black Mesa is really damn good.

I know it's a bit corny to be like "haha the fans did it better" but considering how Half-Life: Source was pretty... middling, to say the least, even just as a Source port, I really feel Black Mesa takes much better advantage of the Source engine by just, well, recreating all the assets and art within the engine, resulting in the game just looking visually gorgeous overall - to the point where it doesn't look out of place with more modern FPS games and is easy to forget that it's based off of a game from 1998. I really liked the atmosphere of the original as it is, but Black Mesa enhances it with improved lighting and models. Xen especially looks absolutely gorgeous with the environment, lighting and just seeing all the creatures of space around you in the sky and whatnot.

Not to mention, in addition to being a massive visual overhaul, the game does make some changes to the original gameplay and stage design. This does make it a bit less faithful as a remake to the original, but at the same time I think the aspects that were remade mostly bring about an even better experience. In addition to just being so much nicer looking, Xen in general is a lot more 'cohesive' in this game - whereas in the original it was basically just a bunch of floating platforms that you could get past in a few minutes, Black Mesa actually has you exploring the planet - still involving platforming but taking you through a few different environments with a greater focus on puzzles throughout the journey. It just makes it feel a lot more 'alive', and more like an actual planet, rather than in the original where it was basically just kind of a video game level thrown together. Plus, while this is a bit more related to the story rather than the core game design, I also really liked how Interloper (the final chapter before the final boss) had you interacting with the Vortagaunts in the context of their own society, which without spoiling too much, actually kind of provides some context why they appear more friendly in Half-Life 2 despite being common enemies in the original.

If I did have a criticism on a game design level though, it's that the Interloper chapter does feel a bit too drawn out in my opinion. I think a lot of it just comes down to there being a ton of 'conveyour' sections which you basically have to stand and wait for periods of time while occasionally fighting enemies and avoiding hazards, with the puzzles and setpieces towards the end of the stage kind of just getting more repetitive to the point where about halfway in I was just constantly wishing the chapter would end already.

Otherwise, the same gameplay of Half-Life 1 is pretty much intact - the gunplay and movement especially feels just as good here as they did in the original and there's a really good use of the game's environments in finding ways to traverse.

My only other major criticism of any sort is that the native Linux version of this game is pretty broken. I started the game via the native Linux version and I pretty much immediately noticed issues with the lighting where reflections and shadows would constantly flicker and appear 'broken up' for lack of a better word on top of just being inconsistent with the environment in general (sometimes the lighting would completely change/cut out just by walking two steps in the same exact area and room), and I also noticed some objects that I assume were from later parts of the game appearing transparently through the walls of the room I was in. Plus, after looking it up, I did see quite a few reports of people experiencing massive frame drops throughout the game but I didn't really play the game's native Linux version long enough to really run into anything like that. The next solution was playing the game's Windows version through Proton and that worked better but at the same time, I did run into somewhat frequent stuttering and frame drops, plus the game crashing pretty frequently even after I turned down the settings. Lo and behold, I didn't run into these issues when I ultimately decided to play through the rest of the game on my actual Windows partition on the exact same hardware and at Max settings (at worst the frame rate dipping to ~30FPS at some intense points towards the end of the game). I say all that to warn you, if you're playing this game on Linux, I would recommend playing the game through Proton, but even then you might have to expect some issues. Also I guess the loading screens did feel a bit long but that's kind of just a weird quirk of the Source engine and I imagine it'd be better on an SSD.

But yeah, good fucking game and would definitely recommend playing it if you liked the original Half-Life.

(Difficulty: Hard)
Part intriguing puzzle, part exceptional platformer, and all fps. This game is something very special and is so well-made I found myself applauding the developers time and time again.
What starts as a regular day in an underground facility quickly turns sinister. Gordan Freeman is our voiceless protagonist in an orange suit wielding a crow-bar and some other handy weapons and explosives I would dare not spoil. It starts a bit slow but quickly ramps up into something that feels very fleshed out and quite challenging at the hardest difficulty. Heavy and weighted gun play, monstrously aware enemies, and tight jumps left me always excited for the next section. The ambiance and atmosphere is well constructed and some of the writing is very funny. It takes itself seriously but finds time to pepper in jokes and unexpected irreverence.
Boss fights and levels can feel sometimes cramped and other times overwhelmingly vast.
So many sections I had no idea what was coming next in the best way.
This is also not a game for the faint of heart. It wants you to explore and find things out on your own which is so fun. Every puzzle and hidden passage to find the next area is so satisfying because nothing is just handed to you. It gives metroid-vania vibes constantly.
Game crashed on me once in 20 hours and I had very few instances of frame drops. Also a few very minor clipping issues but everything else is wonderful.
Holds up in 2023 and many developers STILL TO THIS DAY don't do things as well as Black Mesa does.This is a gem and I highly recommend.

Well that was an experience and a half! While I've never played the original half life, I wanted to catch up on the story before playing what has been argued as one of the best games ever made.
Now that I've played this, I can see why half life 2 is so hyped up!
The game its self is a great shooter with a few bugs, as expected of the source engine. And while I've never played the original, I watched a walk through to see the differences between the games. My conclusions:
Xen was indeed a bit longer then it needed to be, but Black mesa's Xen was much more fun then the buggy landscape of Half Life seemed to be, and it gave some clues to the story of half life 2.
Some of the combat sequences like Forget about Freeman, needed the change, and in Black Mesa, Forget about freeman was one of the coolest video game fights I've ever been in!
Gonarch is still a bitch, and the end boss was more scripted then it was in Half Life, but it made you feel absolutely awesome. Which I think was the entire point of this remake/highlight. To make you, as Gordon Freeman, feel like you live up to the hype of your character.
I can't bloody wait to play half life 2!

Rather than my own Black Mesa review, I think the analysis that could be of some interest here would be a breakdown of how it feels to play Half-Life for the first time in 2023. It was enlightening for me to realise how used I am to hand holding in games. I often found myself missing a quest log of some sort, or got lost without a clear goal: I know I have to go to Lambda, but where is that? Should I be able to see it from here? Am I going the right direction? Why am I entering the sewers? Should I really keep trying to reach that ledge? Why can't I remember what the last scientist told me? And so on. These are probably a problem with myself rather than flaws of the game, but still I found a few other issues related to the aging of the original material:

· Lack of exploration whatsoever: 95% of the time, if you can access some place, that is because it is the way to go. Again, this could be a problem with me being used to more modern sandbox games or open worlds, but since very early in the game my location awareness was warped.
· Platforming gets awful at times: narrow spaces and layouts with sometimes unreadable level design gave me more than one headache. It does get better with the tools from the late game, but still I would get stuck or have issues with hitboxes more often than what I would expect in this genre.
· AIs weak spots are common and easy to see.
· Autosaves can happen "anywhere", sometimes even mid-death; it is not really that impactful but lately I am finding that this type of issues triggers me more and more.
· Other technical issues derived from an engine which probably doesn't have much more to give, such as frequent crashes (uncharacteristic for my high-end machine) and a strange bug that kept changing my video settings to literally Potato quality.

A few counterpoints to back up why I can recommend Black Mesa:

· It has the coolest suit up scene in videogames that I can remember.
· It manages to create a feeling of real DISGUST with Headcrabs and Barnacles. Holy shit. Even if I am able to see how plain the instruments are (models, design, animations, audio), the sum of the parts provokes absolute revulsion in me. Brilliant.
· Its soundtrack is 👌.
· I know the hidden hat and pizza challenges get a lot of hate but I genuinely had a lot of fun carrying those items absurdly.

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.

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.

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.

I played about halfway through original half life before switching to Black Mesa and honestly it didn’t change how I felt that much. I get that it did a lot for the fps genre in terms of immersion and storytelling but it’s a slog to play through. It’s too long and you spend so much time in ugly, boring hallways and vents and miscellaneous factory shit. So much of this game could be trimmed. There were cool parts that I enjoyed but they weren’t enough to stop me dreading the next alien factory I’d have to trudge through.

Honestly..not strictly a bad game but there's just something not quite there.

The devs clearly acknowledged that the game would benefit from having certain parts cut or altered; yet there were things left in that just aren't great game design. Almost every instance of platforming was kept or even extended for no sensible reason. Especially considering how much poetic license was taken with Xen; so much could have been tweaked throughout the game but was instead repeated verbatim.

All in all a fine remake but it's hard to overlook the repeating of crap 90s design choices in a game made in the 2010s.

Genre: Genre-defining adventure shooter puzzle thingy | Released: March 2020 | Platform: PC | Developer: Crowbar Collective | Publisher: Crowbar Collective | Language: English | Length: 15 hours | Difficulty: Easy | Do I Need To Play Anything First: No, this is a remake of the original Half-Life game with added and changed content. It does not replace the first game, nor is the first game required. I have not played the original and had a fantastic time | Accessibility Options: Fast reactions required | Monetization: Single Purchase | Microtransaction: None | Gambling Elements: None | Content Warning: Violence, gore, gross… stuff | Parenting Guide: M for mature, adults-only | How Did You Play It: Via steam | Did you need a guide: No, and don’t use one unless you really need one | Mods: None

Is It Good: It’s mesmerizing and I can’t wait to boot up the original. A must-play.

Back of the Box: Quite a nasty piece of work you managed over there, I am impressed.

Black Mesa is an odd game, as it’s a fan remake of the first Half-Life fully supported and sold by Valve on their own storefront. This is a fantastic way to experience the original, and I can’t recommend it enough. The new content the team has added to the last levels is fantastic, and I would not have known it was never part of the original game unless told.

It’s an excellent game that is based on one of the greatest games ever made. It’s very, very good. Play it.

Follow me at The Pile for more reviews (including books and films)

https://thepile.substack.com/

Feels more prideful than celebratory.
I don’t like being rude to fangames, especially for a game like BM in which it’s one of the more polished and scaled ones.
I get that people disliked Xen, here it’s definitely more polished..just in a very traditional sense.
Xen feels now like a cop out for game design bros, as it feels more designed and thought out. What I implied by traditional is how Valve-esque it feels, plug in a cable, move something etc. etc., but now you have to play through a section as long as 60% of pre-Xen, as much as delightful as it looks, it’s still exhausting and tiring and a big pace breaker for the remake.
OST was pretty unremarkable throughout the game except when I’ve reached Xen where I’ve heard a soundtrack that with proper budget could be featured in a big high profile release. Art direction doesn’t look weird since this is still Source and really works for the game’s calmer brooding horror tone, but I still prefer how the original looked in comparison.
Overall its a fine game, but still a demonstration of why going bigger in scale doesn’t match the brilliance of the subtler design decision.

This is a pretty nice fan remake of the original Half Life. Really enjoyed the weapons feeling more competent (except the shotgun), glad I don't have to magdump the SMG on an enemy an pray it was enough to kill them. This game feels a lot more easier to beat than the original because of the weapons rework though I don't mind but I'm sure there's a purist out there who dislikes that. absolutely enjoyed their reimagining of Xen visually and gameplay wise. I think if this was a 1of1 modern remake of HL1 I probably would have rated this lower simply on the premise that the original game had a lot of design choices that weren't really fun to play. Would be interesting to see their interpretations of the Gearbox expansions as well if it was in their interest to.