Minor Spoilers Ahead
An ending can really ruin a game for you, and this is exactly the case with Black Mesa. I think Crowbar Collective have a great understanding of how to do remakes, but cannot make their own original content.
The problems started before escaping the lab into Xen. The game starts to put mind numbingly easy puzzles like the teleporter puzzle and useless back tracking. However, this, for the most part, is fine. When you enter Xen however, the problems arise. Up until that point the game has perfect pacing, and it grinds to a halt in Xen. It is all just monotonous platforming and puzzles and occasional boring, open space combat. This is only made worse by the chapter after xen, Interloper, which is even longer and has even more mediocre platforming and puzzles with little combat. I genuinly felt like my brain was smoothening while playing, it felt like playing one of those roblox obbys or something. The final boss sucks too, why the fuck is there no music? Also to finish off with the criticisms, this game was buggy as HELL. I had crashes in the double digits, consistent frame rate issues, save issues, UI issues, practically everything you can think of. Technically this game sucks.
The reason I have the score as high as I do despite criticizing it so much, is that the first 8 or so hours are AMAZING. If it had ended at the Lambda core, this would be an easy 4/5. I didnt connect with the story, maybe cause I didn't really understand it, but the gameplay was fantastic.
Fuck this game's ending
An ending can really ruin a game for you, and this is exactly the case with Black Mesa. I think Crowbar Collective have a great understanding of how to do remakes, but cannot make their own original content.
The problems started before escaping the lab into Xen. The game starts to put mind numbingly easy puzzles like the teleporter puzzle and useless back tracking. However, this, for the most part, is fine. When you enter Xen however, the problems arise. Up until that point the game has perfect pacing, and it grinds to a halt in Xen. It is all just monotonous platforming and puzzles and occasional boring, open space combat. This is only made worse by the chapter after xen, Interloper, which is even longer and has even more mediocre platforming and puzzles with little combat. I genuinly felt like my brain was smoothening while playing, it felt like playing one of those roblox obbys or something. The final boss sucks too, why the fuck is there no music? Also to finish off with the criticisms, this game was buggy as HELL. I had crashes in the double digits, consistent frame rate issues, save issues, UI issues, practically everything you can think of. Technically this game sucks.
The reason I have the score as high as I do despite criticizing it so much, is that the first 8 or so hours are AMAZING. If it had ended at the Lambda core, this would be an easy 4/5. I didnt connect with the story, maybe cause I didn't really understand it, but the gameplay was fantastic.
Fuck this game's ending