Updated textures and graphics alone would have been a welcome addition but they go further still to slightly tweak and rework parts of the game to keep it fresh. They expand the final few levels of the game quite a bit, so the rest of the review will speak to those. Spoilers ahead for those not familiar with the first game.

I have to commend the developers on the lengths they went to improve upon the Xen portion of Half-Life. While I don't think it necessarily needed to be lengthened or modified I was excited to see what they had in store. They expand the final levels in some very interesting ways.

Story telling takes a front seat in these final hours--let's say passenger, because the gameplay is still driving here. Through some environmental story telling so well executed in the likes of Left 4 Dead, you get a glimpse of what an enslaved Vortigaunt's pitiful existence might look like--they are put to work by the controllers, live in hovels under tight survellance and are discarded when their utility has been fully exploited. These moments fill in the gap of the canon not really explored by Valve, where between Half-life and HL2 Gordon Freeman becomes a living deity to the Vortigaunts through his actions at the end of this game.

Gameplay wise, you can expect some extremely tightly designed levels and puzzles that rival, if not surpass the work of Valve themselves. An extensive look into what the industrial machine behind an invasion of earth looks like provides an environmental palette for the level and puzzle designers to work with -- a lot of standing on pumps to reach higher areas, or crawling through tunnels to reach that final cable in a puzzle. They created two (maybe three) 'marathon' set pieces that test your ability to run and gun. There were a couple interesting puzzles added around the controllers too. As for the two boss fights they have expanded those mechanically as well. All great stuff!

My gripes with this final stretch are few, but they might prevent me from coming back to play through this portion ever again. Firstly, the length. I understand there might have been so many good ideas for puzzles--again, I saw quite a few--and an overarching urge to get a lot of use out of all the great assets created however these levels just started to drag. Some mechanics, while smartly used may have been used on too many times, or there was just too much of a good thing! Secondly, in some high intensity fights and spaces the game got quite 'framey' for the first time ever. I wonder if there's anything that could be done to optimise them more.

Ending on these points of feedback shouldn't dissuade you from playing one of the best first-person shooter campaigns ever. I hope this team gets the green light to give a similar treatment to Opposing Forces or Blue Shift, or make something entirely of their own in the Half-Life universe, but actually come out -- Arkane's 'Ravenholm' anyone?

Play this game! You won't regret it!

I never played Half Life as a kid, but with a new installment in the series coming out I decided to give it a playthrough. I played Half Life Source up until the Xen levels - see my review posted for my thoughts. The terrible graphics and platforming that awaited me turned me off of finishing the Source version of the game, so I switched over the Black Mesa - and oh boy I'm glad I did!

I am thoroughly impressed by this project - a testament to how much people love the original game. Compared to the feculant looking world of old, this Xen looks stunning - from the crystalline-aquatic backdrop, to the abandoned headcrab zombie infested research stations and the moist bio-factory environments. It all moves seamlessly together to tell a great story within a story. From a technical perspective it ran really well for the most part on a GTX 1060, with relatively few bugs.

I really appreciated the combat set pieces as well - especially the points where you realize you just need to GTFO of the situation. I legitimately felt stressed at times, running from a horde of enemies through dimly lit caves, praying for a healing station (which were very well placed).

I only disliked the platforming aspect of the gameplay - which though apparently much improved from the original levels, is still a bit irritating. Finally, the last hour or two of the experience felt a bit drawn out. Really cool environments which flesh out the story, but I found myself wanting things to be over and groaning a bit when I was on yet another conveyor belt or elevator...

Still, this is a 5 star experience - worthy ending chapters to a landmark game that I'm sure some people have been waiting for since 1998.

I suppose being surprised this is such an achievement is underselling the team, given many of them are no doubt professional developers and artists, but nevertheless this is absolutely remarkable.

I expected a thorough sprucing up of the original, but it really is a true remake with substantial rework to address parts that haven’t aged well, and to bring the feel much closer to a modern game. Well, “modern” in my head, which realistically is probably “ten years ago”, but that’s no bad thing. It is completely clear to see why Valve permitted this to move ahead and be sold on Steam.

If I had any criticisms, it would be that the reworked Xen and Interloper are far too long—personally I feel two or three times too long—but Xen is stunning and it’s overall still a huge improvement over the original. I ended up tackling Interloper over a few beers on voice chat with some friends, so I didn’t really notice the time going by in the end.

You can also spot in parts where less focus and attention was given. For example, chapters like Forget About Freeman feel like a game that came out a few years before the rest of it; likely a result of everyone’s favourite parts being polished and refined over the very long development period with less attention given to other parts.

I hope the whole team is very proud of what they’ve done here, they really should be.

Having only played ten minutes of the original Half-life, I thought Black Mesa would be a good opportunity to play the game with improved graphics. On this front, the game did not disappoint, as all the textures and NPCs looked much more realistic. The game itself is as fantastic as I had heard it would be, with an interesting story, engaging gameplay, and lots of goofy scientists!

However, even as someone who had not played the original, it was really quite obvious that the Xen section had been expanded. The whole pacing of the narrative, which was done extremely well in the previous chapters, just suddenly felt slow and disrupted, with hours of extra gameplay stuffed in at the end. My interest in getting to the final boss was slowly drained away by tedious levels with similar designs, some of which could have been good if there just wasn't so many! Xen in Black Mesa is mostly puzzle-based and there is very little plot development in the added levels, so it becomes same-ish very quickly.

So while the original game deserves a 5/5, Black Mesa as a whole falls slightly behind for me due to the laborious nature of the added Xen material.

Half Life is a game with an enormous amount of prestige in the gaming world. That being said, I never played any of the originals. I finally decided to try it out through the Black Mesa fan remaster. So, this will be a review of both Black Mesa & Half-Life. I’ve heard Black Mesa is a pretty faithful remake of the original Half-Life, but if there are any differences, I can’t comment on them.

The main reason I started with Black Mesa is the graphical update. Nothing against the original, but now the people look a little less boxy. The aliens are also more gruesome looking. The different locations pop with details as well. You start off in an office complex type environment, then move on to industrial environments, and there’s a section where you fight through the desert canyons. It’s a lot of gray/brown hallways & I don’t know if that’s from Black Mesa building off the trend or from Half-Life helping found it. I was fighting to maintain interest after going through Power Up, On a Rail, & Apprehension. They weren’t visually interesting levels to look at overall. The level design does start to pick back up with the Lambda Labs. Xen is a visually interesting, deep-sea inspired planet filled with bizarre bio-luminescent plants.

So, Half-Life was a game that helped reinvent FPS games. We were going from shooters like DOOM that were just “Here’s a gun, get to work” to shooters that had a plot and world building. As I play through Black Mesa I can see how the game has one foot in the old school and one in the new. There’s a slower pace to the game and you come across friendly NPCs that give you plot details, very much like a modern cinematic game. After that, you go down an elevator into a room chock full of Hound Eyes or Vortigons for a firefight that felt reminiscent of DOOM to me.

The combat still has that DOOM DNA. While there is plenty of cover you can bob and weave between, a lot of the alien enemies have projectile attacks that are best handled by moving around constantly. The soldiers are hit scanners that require a more modern gameplay style of using cover. When not in combat, there are some puzzles and platforming. These are done by manipulating objects in the world. The closest thing I can compare it to is the grab feature in 3D Fallout games. While it’s a novelty there, it's a legit puzzle solving requirement in Half Life. It’s weird using it as an actual gameplay element. First person platforming is always hit and miss, but Black Mesa is pretty generous with jumps and having big enough platforms, except for that freaking booby-trapped warehouse! Ladders can be a bit finnicky but are manageable.

Your selection of weapons is more grounded in reality. While we aren’t at the Halo 2 weapon limit, you aren’t hauling around miniguns and super shotguns. Your workhorse weapons are standard military arms. You do unlock a few eccentric science weapons, but you are given just enough energy ammo that you can’t rely on them solely. In a humorous bit of “Simpson revolver magazine” logic, your SPAS 12’s special attack is firing from “both barrels”. The SPAS is not a double-barreled shotgun. A lot of the weapons really seem to lack a punch. I expect that with the starter pistol, but the SMG, the only real automatic weapon, feels underpowered. Every enemy feels like they take just a few seconds too longer to kill than I feel they should. Which, in regard to aliens sure, you can wave that away with science magic, but the soldiers are the worst.

Overall, I found this game had an issue with overstaying it’s welcome. Along with the soldiers taking too long to kill, the levels also feel like they go on for about 10 to 15 mins too long. The first block of levels go by at a good pace, I felt like I was making progress. A highlight was the admin area where I assembled a group of survivors, and we started wrecking the baddies. I did get lost a few times. Sometimes the way forward was a little vent in the corner that wasn’t always well indicated. Then as I got to levels like On a Rail, Surface Tension, Xen, and Interloper that just kept going. I understand some of it for the sake of the pacing, but it just never ends. Xen is when you first go to explore the titular planet. It is an engaging moment seeing this literally alien world, but after 30 mins of the same level, that wonder has worn off. A lot of the levels started off interesting but quickly turned into a slog.

The story of Half Life feels pulled out of a 50s sci-fi movie or a more fleshed out reimagining of DOOM’s story. You work in an Area 51 type of underground base in New Mexico where all sorts of exploratory science is going on. You are Gordon Freeman, a scientist running late for work, and his day only gets worse. Aliens invade the lab, and you try to stop them. Along the way you come across scientists that are the caricature of the sniveling intellectual and guards that are more capable, blue-collar guys. Both still stand little chance against the enemies you face. Eventually the military is sent in to “clean up”. So you have to dodge them along with the aliens. The story is very front loaded, after you get the goal of getting to the Lambda Labs you encounter less friendly NPCs to give you story beats. When you finally get to Xen you do learn the Vortigons you were fighting weren’t willing combatants, but enslaved soldiers.

Gordon Freeman is famously a silent protagonist. I have never been a fan of silent protagonists and that holds true for Half Life. This is not a typical day in the office for Gordon, I’d like to know his thoughts on this. Some of these people are his coworkers, he’d probably have something to say to them. Gordon is a theoretical physicist. As far as I know, he’s just as incompetent as the other sniveling scientists, how does he go full Schwarzenegger? A bit more nitpicky, but I find it odd how committed to their orders the soldiers are. At first it makes sense, but when things start going pear shaped for them, you’d think they’d stop trying to kill me and focus on all the aliens.

All in all, I can’t say I enjoyed Half Life/Black Mesa. There were a lot of times I had to force myself to keep playing. There are fun set pieces, but levels just go on too long with little that happens, especially towards the end. During its time, Half Life was a technical marvel that pushed boundaries and set a new tone for future FPS games to imitate, but now it feels like an exhibit of a bygone era. As a remaster, I would probably appreciate Black Mesa more if I had that nostalgia for the original. I very much consider Half Life a classic in the Mark Twain sense, “something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.”

Half-Life has been one of the childhood games I've dedicated much of my time to and considering its highly esteemed place in the gaming world, it is natural that a remake would have big shoes to fill for the modern times. Crowbar Collective took their precious time (~1½ decade!) building their remake from scratch and polishing it to make the classic justice. Have they succeeded?

It's clearly noted that Black Mesa faithfully follows the main bulk of the original Half-Life when it comes to plot and level design of this good, old research facility. The plot of an experiment gone wrong and the crowbar-wielding scientist's journey to survive and help his colleagues is just as we old players know it. The key characters are there but liberties have been taken as well to add references to both events and people that would take place in the Half-Life sequels. I find that notion to be a nice treat for HL fans!

For many reasons, the Source engine has been put to its test to ensure that Black Mesa's contents really holds water. The levels have been spruced up with tons of extra details, as if the Black Mesa research facility was made a target for internal design. Other than the looks that makes Black Mesa considerably immersive, parts of the levels have been remade to add in some extra challenge puzzle- and combat-wise, with more fun results. As I've also played the early mod stage of Black Mesa, I noticed the team didn't shy from adding in where they see fit, which speaks of the team's dedication.

The team has even lived up to their promises of reworking the Xen chapters, not only enhancing its looks but also adding in their own ideas that would breathe new life into the borderworld. Besides the levels being longer and more intuitive design-wise, it's much fresher and enjoyable to play through and experience its own atmospheric environment. Crowbar Collective has definitely made the Xen chapters more like its own game.

The music soundtrack adds to the high definition setting of the remake, with a more cinematic approach of the industrial and atmospheric tinges while there are some aesthetics kept from the original Half-Life. The soundtrack pieces in the Xen chapters are as well remembered because it walks hand in hand with the fascination and awe of what Crowbar Collective have brought in their full release.

To sum it up, Black Mesa treads both old and new generations excellently, making a fresh treat for old Half-Life fans while also catering to the younger players, despite the fact that the Source engine being used is nearly two decades old at this time. If people had been on the fence with Half-Life to this day for some reason, this is a new chance to grasp the reason why Half-Life is revered as one of the all-time, FPS classics.

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)

Since the release of the new Xen chapters, Black Mesa has truly matured from an upgraded version of the original Half Life into something truly special. Pretty much the same story of the first game, you control Gordon Freeman as he makes his way out of the Black Mesa research facility after an experiment involving a rift to an alien dimension.

Most of the game is very similar, with slightly larger areas to explore, more balanced weapons and ammunition, and updates to physics to resemble Half-Life 2. This recreates some of the more dramatic and engaging parts of the original Half-Life such as the chaotic intro but also recreates a lot of the dry and at times dull design of the middle.

However, by the time the player reaches Xen they discover a dramatic amount of changes and gameplay designs that make this into one of the most extraordinary first-person shooters of all time. The research facilities in the human world definitely received plenty of touch-ups and look much better, but Xen is another thing entirely, with gorgeous alien worlds and vistas that truly blow the player away. Whether it's exciting chase sequences, engaging puzzle design, or the grand finale against Nihilanth, everything the original Half Life could be is blown away by this amazingly remade finale. The music is also original, and faithfully resembles the ambiance of the original but goes into dramatic glory at the climax of Xen.

If the game just faithfully recreated Half-Life in all of its upsides and downsides, we would get a charming remake that makes the trip through Black Mesa feel a little better. However, this game flexes a fantastic addition that cannot be missed, making Xen one of the pinnacles of FPS campaigns.