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)
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)