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.
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.