Recent reviews by Brune

I've played a lot of the game. I have 7 and a half hours as of this writing and that's about 45 playthroughs give or take. I've played this game countless times to understand and study the game. (I bet you didn't know you could press in the seat in the bar.) This game is probably one of the best narrative interactions I've found. This style of game allows you to piece together the story. In the way of a Her Story or Gone Home. This is a mystery to uncover wrapped in a story about one last heist. It's entirely environmental story telling and I believe does it very well but it expects you to do things that a lot of other games don't. Figure out the story for yourself.

This also comes with Citizen Abel's last game Gravity Bone which is very much in the same vain as thirty flights. It's about the same length but where Thirty Flights is purely communicated via emotions and scenes Gravity Bone allows itself to use on screen text and voice to fill in bits of the narrative.

Ran through about one play through in an hour. Was able to get probably one of the best endings from what I could tell. It was fun and brought a lot of interesting topics. Certainly topical to current politics.

Fairly honest though, the writing is a bit strange. It's more there for skimming rather than fully investigating. Not a ton of things to dig into a read. For around 3 dollars it's certainly worth the price and your time.

This is a great first person slice them up while shooting them and beating them up and everything them up cause you a ninja!

The game is great, well polished but only about 4-5 levels. I hope to watch them expand on it.

Oh, and its 3 dollars. Just buy it.

Overall Black Mesa is currently a picture book. A best hits of the original half-life. It tried to take these moments and string them together with original segments but these segments always seem to take a lot less time for the player to deal with unless they get completely stuck.

They took the charm out of the original Half-Life.

In the original half-life you could do things like kill snark nests with explosives to prevent them from spawning snarks.

Also the tau cannon weapon doesn't go through ANY wall in this game. Not even glass or a rail. It's like they forgot what the point of the weapon was.

These are just some quick examples of how you can see where they lost their way.

I touched on this before but I get stuck A TON in this game. I have no clue why but I could spend 20-30 minutes looking for a door that never worked before and doesn't look like it should work.

Performance wise there are even spots where my 970 gets as low as 60 FPS which on a very old engine seems rather alarming.

Lastly the TLDR is Black Mesa is probably a great game to someone who hasn't played the original over 20 times. As I can still remember things from the original it more or less ruins my experience of black mesa.

Coming back to finish Xen, I still got randomly lost in large levels that felt like it wasn't about exploring but getting shuffled down the right path. I mean overall it wasn't too painful but it feels like the level design could use a bit of polish. I will say overall the art in this game is where it shines. It still looks great 3 years later.

Pulled out my OS chip and I died.

The game is a great adventure with a strong story. Well worth the 60 dollar release.

It reminds me of everything good about RCT. The people have been wanting a great coaster tycoon game and planet coaster met and crushed expectations. I'm nominating it for the "Just 5 more minutes" award because several times I just end up playing it until 3 am.

I am in a very odd camp. I love this game. I love it because it's a game that offers you choice. Because of this the environments are condensed, the side missions are short (yet impactful) and the game itself is honestly one of the better examples of how to have choice effect your game.

This game is well noted for having odd technical issues. The UI is laggy and some of the gameplay choices such as inventory slots being 1 size fits all and the universal ammo not forcing people to use different weapons.

If you are able to look past the above three flaws then the game is amazing. The narrative is great, the side missions give you depth into the world and the environments while small are very well done. I've played through this game a number of times from both sides of it. You can get dropped off in different places for each new location, you can side with eather faction at any given point in the story and you can actually make meaningful choices at the end as to which faction will rule the world.


Not only that but it digs up the past in the best way possible. It determines that Paul and JC are alive and possibly well if you pick that faction. It boils the game down into a nice package.

In a way I am happy the modern games didn't try to tack onto the series ending that invisible war created because it ended it in a casade of choice.

So for those who value choice and well written narrative the game is worth it.

Nuke.com Videogames.com and Giantbomb.com in all their videos, reviews and quicklooks have shown this game to be great. I picked it up and returned it at first. The 15 dollar pack is a complete rip off. It punishes you for being cautious by charging you 5 dollars more if you decide to upgrade. After returning it I decided to give the game a second chance after seeing the amazing coverage from the sites mentioned and have enjoyed the full game ever since.

A great example of movement mechanics done right. Clearly worth 3 dollars just to slide around and see how momentum done well can really feel amazing.

One of the most horrible games I've played. It constantly crashed depending on which mission you picked. You simply can't play the game on most missions. The missions you can play show the game to be boring. Frankly I've played more thoughtout and stable games from a game jam.