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.

One thing I used to do on Gmod when I was 14-15 was to go on gm_bigcity and spawn in like 300 Combine troops to hunt after me and arm myself with a bunch of M9K weapons to kill them all, or as many as I could until I died. Tacky, yeah, but this game and its sloppy mechanics/skirmishes reminded me of that. But what would I rather play right now, or at any moment in the future, for that matter? Yeah, Gmod.

This game has such a fatally bad understanding of the Half-Life world and aesthetic, as it feels like the creators wanted to fuse it with the cinematic, grandiose nature of the MGS games, a fusion that would barely work in good hands in the first place, let alone made by people who made a story and script as bad as this. This idea that we're finally playing as "the villain" is so transient and forced, even due to how the story unfolds. It is so divorced from everything that made the HL games great and is a pretty embarrassing stain on a lot of the amazing mods that have been created from Source and GoldSrc. For instance, Kelly Bailey's amazing, atmospheric scores for the original Half-Life games have been replaced by some stock music-ass, Epidemic Sound ass battle music that not only wildly varies in style but none of which fits with the game or HL2 for that matter, save for a pretty great main theme/menu theme and a few other themes done by composer Paul Humphrey. Still feels tangentially disconnected from the HL vibe, but it's still good and I'm giving credit where credit is due as a fellow musician.

The gunplay and firefights, as I alluded to earlier, are garbage. You're always meant to be in a big empty room killing 10s upon 10s of enemies, and the objectives are so unclear that half of the time you go through about 90 enemies in 10 minutes before you realize "Huh, maybe I'm meant to be going somewhere!" and find you can open this train car door hidden off to the side of the gigantic train station to move to the next section. The absolute worst. Did Half-Life 2 also not have a super-intensive HUD and not give you objectives through it? Yes. But it was able to easily display a point A and B through its excellent level design, which is impossible in HDTF, cuz every area is so big that it feels like you could hold two concurrent games of football in them. Act 2 as a whole is a masterclass in how NOT to do game/level design.

There are very minimal shades of passion and good gamescraft here and there. Some of the vistas throughout the game look quite nice, the choice to put a timer culminating to seven hours throughout the first act (referencing the duration of the Seven Hour War) was pretty cool, and the intersections between Mitchell and Gordon's journey were nice. These guys who made the game are very obviously Half-Life fans, which makes me sorta feel bad for loathing this game.

Not gonna say much more because "Hunt Down The Refund" is a pretty excellent deconstruction of everything wrong with the game. And just to mirror something he said in the video, yes, the audio mastering in the game is ungodly bad. There are cutscenes where voice actors are at entirely different volume levels and have completely different mastering of their voices, and there are sections where what people are saying becomes completely inaudible due to the terrible radio EQ. This problem couldn't even be visually subsided since the game doesn't have working subtitles, what an embarrassment. And yes, I'm gonna acknowledge but try to move past the protag in his presumable 40s-50s having a short-lived love interest in a girl he met when she was a child, which is obviously gross. That alone is enough to make me dislike this game, but there's so much more fundamentally wrong with it.

Anyways, this game's had enough of my energy already. At least I have a new answer for the times anyone asks me "What's your least favorite game?"

You fucked up my face/10

Just an absolute textbook definition on how to do a sequel.

The original Portal was a pretty small game, but one that had a ton of say and will go down in the history books, and this takes nearly everything from that game and both elaborates and improves on it. The story is pretty incredible, it expands upon the first game without changing much about it and tells a really depressing yet heartfelt tale about the human condition and how impermanent we are, with the help of characters that are nothing short of iconic.

The mechanics themselves are a perfect elaboration upon what the first game was not only showing but hinting at, with brand new concepts joining the fray to wonderful effect, like the gels. The co-op is also at no stop before unforgettable.

I say "nearly everything" earlier because, while I do believe this to be the better game and one that's deserving of a 5/5, I prefer the atmosphere of the first game. For all the great moments that Mike Morasky's score has, it just doesn't come anywhere close to instilling the same feeling of dread and trepidation that Kelly Bailey's score for the first game had. However this game definitely has a different story and vibe, and for all it threw out there, Morasky's score works very well.