Recent reviews by Neal

For $40 (and 70 gigabytes!), I expected more. The game is clearly headed toward being live service with the lack of content, and it's a shame because this had the potential to have taken what games like Deep Rock Galactic had and improve on it on release, but instead it feels like a husk of what it could be.

- Two very generic enemy factions, bugs or robots. There are some variety in them, moreso with robots, but there should be a lot more for being the two only factions you fight in the game. I expected enemies on the level of Earth Defense Force rather than being Starship Troopers with mechs.
- No incentive to continue using a weapon you purchased earlier on. You cannot customize weapons in this game; some have modified versions in the warbond pass, but most do not. Earlier primary and secondary weapons are completely outclassed by weapons later on, limiting playstyles if you want to go on the harder difficulties. Non-stratagem weapons in general all feel the same with the main difference being damage output, and most stratagem weapons are just not worth using. Get the railgun and a guard dog and you'll never need to touch any other weapon again.
- Enemy population does not scale with players, meaning playing solo or having a full squad will net you the same amount of enemies to fight. Good luck doing anything by yourself on higher difficulties!
- Balancing of enemies and weapons in general is questionable. Continuing on from earlier, most weapons feel like they should pack a punch but require you to dump an entire mag into an enemy to kill them, all while the majority of enemies have no feedback to taking a hit.
- Extremely repetitive mission and submission types. I wouldn't mind this if there were some variation to how you complete the missions, but the only variation is how you use your arrow keys to start the mission and the journey to get there. The actual mission itself is the exact same every single time, even the geometry for the mission is the exact same.
- Procedurally generated planets feel like Starfield procedurally generated planets that were compressed to 1/4th the size. The terrain is mostly flat with some hills, trees, and rocks strewn around to fit the needs of each biome. Each biome plays the same, there are no weather events or biome-specific enemies to fight.
- Kernel level anti-cheat that is a real pain to uninstall. It's PvE. The only purpose is to stop people from getting easy access to Super Credits.
- The game is completely online, you cannot connect to the game offline. Current server issues aside, this trend of games that can be played singleplayer requiring online connections to even get into the game should have died long ago.

You shoot bugs and robots, walk more to shoot bugs and robots to finish missions that blend into each other, extract and buy guns off of the battle pass and store to continue shooting bugs and robots with explosions mixed in. That's the game. There's not really much memorable about it and you'll forget all about it after your honeymoon phase with the game ends and you don't play for a few months.

Is this game entirely bad? No, and I'll continue to play it with friends. This game just feels soulless. Statagems are the best part of this game and they're a nerfed version of the ones from the original. There's a sprinkle of the same humor from Starship Troopers and realistic epic awesome graphics with cool explosions and ragdoll physics which is enough for redditors to get their kicks and call this game the most fun they've had since sliced bread, but when Deep Rock Galactic does all of the above and more so, so much better for $30 (and often goes on sale for just $10!) I can't see why you wouldn't play that instead.

TL;DR: The story is bad, which would be fine on its own, if it weren't for the problem of the game play being just as bad. Go play The Forest if you want better gameplay, better story, and replayability.

I'll layout the problems with the game play below - due to character limits, I've elected to paste the story part of this review on pastebin: https://pastebin.com/iyrTiCnf

- Horrific crafting system
* So much of my experience would have been better if I could just do crafting faster. If I wanted to craft more arrows for my bow, I'd have to craft one arrow at a time, making my desire to actually make arrows decrease immensely. After crafting, I would be put in a close to three second animation, and then do the process again - so if I wanted to make 5 measly arrows, I'd have to go through about 20 seconds total of waiting. If you don't want to make a 'click-to-craft' button that would pick out everything from your inventory at once to craft, fine. But at least allow me to make multiple things at once!

- Co-op has issues
* We had several issues with saves in our group of three, the biggest being save syncing. At the end of a session, we would save and quit from the menu, and continue on the next day. On our second session, one of the non-hosted players would load a different, previous save, and lose all the non-story progress we had. We thought it was a problem with saving and quitting through the menu, so we crafted a shelter and saved through that, only to come across the same problems. It was very inconsistent with saves, so when we thought we could apply a band-aid fix ourselves by waiting at the location we expected them to spawn at (for example, if we saved at X but expected them to spawn at Y because of the saving issues, we would wait for them at Y only for them to actually have a proper save load and spawn at X. Very annoying.) I looked into potential fixes for this or to see if it was just a problem with the current patch we were playing, only to find out this has been a problem for over 6 months in a game that is out of Early Access alpha (1.9.2 as of this review) and no one has any fix.

- Harmful animals are poorly designed
* There are some animals in the game that will attack you, whether it be through navigating to the player, or staying still, waiting for you to come to them. One example of the latter is the snake - I cannot see where these are half the time because of the immense foliage and shadows blocking them up, or them spawning partially inside of an object such as a tree which will still trigger the attack. Leeches apparently also rain from the sky, as on average I've managed to get more leeches from being on land than traversing bodies of water.
* There are craftable armors in the game, too; one of these types being metal armor. My group played on what was essentially medium difficulty, and we got to the point where we acquired only metal armor for all limbs (more on this in the below section). We came across a certain animal that apparently ignored our armor entirely and killed us instantly.
* These harmful animals also gave lacerations, wounds, or poison, and it's a complete chore to find the proper plants to heal with because they're so sparse. This would be fine if it weren't for the issue of these status effects decreasing your energy rapidly, making it hard to find the required plants that were so sparse.

- Unnecessary """realism""" for the sake of making the game artificially harder, and overall more tedious
* Too many people gush over the supposed "realism" of this game. If I killed an animal and gutted them for bones and meat, the majority of the time if you were carrying sticks, a water canister, and some other stuff you need for survival outside of the base, you'd become over encumbered because of the weight limit. Four tiny slices of meat weighed my inventory by 10 units or more, and the frail bones we got (usually five or more) added another 10-15 units. 25 units of inventory space that also is never automatically sorted in your backpack (oh yeah, you have to manage your inventory to keep room for objects because apparently you can't keep a pile of leaves oriented one way otherwise you are unable to carry objects - you'd have to rotate it sideways to make space, and even sometimes it would take up less room [?????????????????????????????????]) Now, if you've never played the game and think that 25 units would be fine if you could carry a decent amount, like 100 or more. Nah, the cap is 50 units, and if you thought you could possibly increase the capacity by getting a bigger bag, or increasing a skill level to carry more before becoming over encumbered (existing skill tree is very slow to get progress on, requires MANY hours to max out even one skill out of the 12 that exist currently), there's no such thing. So your character is just skin and bones apparently, capable of applying enough force to a tree with an axe to cut it down, but incapable of carrying 12 slabs of meat and a couple of bones. Cool!
* Before, I mentioned you could get wounds or lacerations from harmful animals. For other status ailments, you could apply a bandage with a plant addition in the crafting menu to help heal the ailments faster. With wounds, you are unable to apply a special bandage, but first need to put a normal bandage on. Afterwards, the bandage wears off and the wound becomes infected. You get a fever at this point I believe, and the only way to heal the wound is to either wait it off and lose health you could use to fend off the other silly parts of the game that could harm you, or find an uncommon carcass with maggots. You apply the maggots, and violà, it heals over a few minutes and doesn't hurt you. For the "realism", I would have expected there to be complications to having maggots literally eating your dead skin, but I'm very glad there's not.
* You need to eat and drink like crazy, which follows in the footsteps of every damn survival game out there for some reason. So in order to survive, you have to deal with the issues of getting enough food back to camp to keep everyone fully fed for that specific set of macro elements (fats, proteins, carbs, hydration) and then eat that food only to sleep a few hours and lose the majority of it. One quick nap, which I believe is around 30-60 minutes in-game time, is enough to reduce each stat by half. Again - this is on medium difficulty.

- Other general annoyances
* If you fall even two feet, you get wounded and need to bandage up. We had to download a mod to increase the fall distance as the geometry occasionally causes you to fall off thin parts.
* Co-op tags disappear after 10 feet of travel, making confusion occur if someone accidentally strays off a path
* Durability on items you *just* crafted is far too low considering there is no way to repair them. I spent a good 30 minutes taking the time to get iron ore, get the charcoal to smelt it, craft it into a mold and smelt that, and create a metal axe with the mold only to find out it has LESS durability on initial craft than an axe crafted with a rock and a stick. Seriously?

Overall, this game could have been so much better if the story was coherent. There are bits and pieces that mislead the player into thinking one thing, but very, very few things that redirects you to the actual goal, and of those none of those really make an impact. Disappointing game.

Beautiful game.

Black Mesa is, without a doubt, the most polished and nurtured Half-Life series mod ever created.

Having a public and free release back in 2012 outside of Steam after starting development shortly after Half-Life: Source's disappointing release, the game was already great. It lacked some of the quality developments brought with the Steam release, but at the time it was still stunning. When Black Mesa came to Steam, the game had looked like an official Valve title. The amount of detail and love put into this game at the time was astounding, and still holds up four years later. While still missing Xen chapters, having every chapter previous to Xen in a re-imagined state with up-to-date graphics was a dream come true. Community updates were frequent, having plenty of communication between developers and community. Even if Xen never released, the game was so fantastic at that point that it was entirely worth buying at a $20 price tag. Getting the game for $7.99, and even at one point $4.99, was an absolute steal.

After waiting years upon years for Xen, it finally came out. The original Half-Life's Xen chapters had been known to be very last-minute by Valve, and technological limitations at the time prevented a proper Xen from occurring - and while some people prefer a desolate wasteland, having such short ending chapters with this exact lackluster art direction provided with the original Xen would be a disappointment. Crowbar Collective's re-imagining of Xen was absolutely perfect in my eyes. The ending chapters are 4-5 hours in length, compared to Half-Life's time of just over an hour. Xen is just visually stunning, and keeps you wondering if you're even on the Source engine anymore because of how quality everything looks. It was looking to be perfect.

However, not everything can be perfect. Xen's biggest flaw thus far (as of the December 6th beta release) is player guidance. Some parts of Xen had me scratching my head as to what I should have done, thinking I had looked everywhere when the answer to progression was in an area hidden away with little to no contextual clues spread through the area. This problem occurs many times starting halfway through Xen, which had me frustrated initially. I will give the benefit of the doubt that because of how large scale of a project remaking Xen had taken, there were some areas that were overlooked. I'm sure with more public testing some of the problems regarding player guidance will be solved, and if that is done, there would be absolutely no complaints about the game from me.

Black Mesa is truly deserving of the Labor of Love award for how willing the developers were in committing to this project for over 14 years. This project has been nothing but amazing watching it unfold, and I sincerely hope Crowbar Collective move onward to either continue with their development studio or be picked up by Valve themselves. Especially in this period where the new Valve has emerged, I am sure that once this game fully releases there will be most certainly some eyes raised by Valve employees.

Thank you Crowbar Collective for giving the Half-Life community content to look forward to. If anyone is new to the franchise and is wondering if Black Mesa is worth starting with, the answer is that is absolutely is.