Black Mesa is a fan-made reimagining of Valve’s original Half-Life that improves all of it’s elements in almost every way. The improvements vary from the visual quality achieved using a more modern Source Engine and a built-in improved Havok physics engine allowing for a better realism representation with pickable objects and ragdolls, AI and navigation of allies that are now able to follow the player without getting stuck, their behavior in critical situations, animations, sound, basis of gameplay mechanics, all of which ultimately fill game’s combat with more dynamic than before. Enemies effectuating a suppressive fire, marines accurately throwing grenades to draw the player from cover, squads spreading out and taking different positions awaiting their target are now able to outflank and get around the player, rushing in only when it is necessary, reacting to damage and taking cover, all of which was originally absent with the enemies running around randomly and unintuitively exploding themselves, the cause of which was a malfunctioning and underdeveloped 1998 AI. The narrative has underwent changes, level design is filled with new details and objects attempting to present the facility as a real place, NPCs like separate characters reacting to player’s actions and commenting on the environment, they are filled with their own personalities, occasional military radio on player’s path is played at specific stages of the game telling the player more about the situation they’re in, alluding to the events of it’s sequel and many more details that are attempting to establish the lore of the game coherently after all of the Valve’s improvisation.

However, even with the Half-Life 2 base being game’s inspiration, the game is barely able to squeeze out of being a nonsensical linear corridor shooter, the concept of which grows dim in front of Half-Life 2’s gameplay and design accomplishments and innovation, as most of the game’s flaws are built on Half-Life 1’s design foundation. Due to the uncertain and difficult development process, large amounts of developers leaving the ship, decisions reevaluated, certain levels developed earlier and left, for the most part as is, inherent 2004’s Source Engine limitations, the game, even with the lightning and post-processing improvements looks dated for it’s time of release, while older levels vary in quality with the newer levels finished many years later. The inconsistent and long process of development restricted the team to the same engine, while the game’s lowest points serve as an excuse for something that could have been modernized 16 years later from Half-Life 2’s release. Voice actors and the hardware being expensive, there’s only a few people in the roaster with the generic NPCs voiced by the same 2 people throughout the whole game. None of the gameplay mechanics feel like a novelty to what has been done many years ago, prop pickup system is left on an exactly the same level as Half-Life 2, an inability to rotate the object or see through it, nearly a complete lack of resource management only typically tied to health, ammo and armor, an infinite flashlight and expectable overly simplistic level design focused on linearity and emptiness with nothing but scavenging, rather than exploration, with no new information given out to the player for his eye for detail with once again, typical resources scattered around the map’s corners where there is nothing to look at. Resources are the only incentive for exploration and aren’t always needed for a skilled enough player, other potential incentives, such as information that could have made into the game are missing. Game’s sole focus on Half-Life 1’s repetitive nature and the restricted Half-Life 2’s physics, none of which underwent refinement, an artistic reimagining, neither a direct improvement, keeps the game’s creative aspect dead in the water, so is the story and the gameplay variety. An extremely minimal amount of named characters and mostly mute narrative keeps new players confused guessing about their goal, as they’re struggling to make sense of the events happening, getting a wrong idea on the plot itself. Stealth is also entirely missing and instead of going through a hard and time consuming coding to add it into the game, there is only one scripted small area in the whole game that can be completed unnoticed. Lack of stealth does not allow for strategic and tactical approach to warfare, bringing new ways to fight off against the military, you’re constantly attacked, which harms replayability and once again, keeps the game as nothing but a low-thought shooter.

Black Mesa being a reimagining of Half-Life 1, even after all those years is still unable to adapt the game to the context of the main character being a scientist, not a soldier, continues to contradict the essence of the main character, forcing him to fight point blank and in plain sight, keeping a ground for experimentation from player’s side to a bare minimum, while also, unrealistically making him carry huge amounts of useless weaponry, that is also a struggle to navigate around for the new players and not knowing what threat is waiting for him next, he would prefer using a narrow ecosystem of weaponry, the one that would properly work around the level design, it's established game design and wouldn't make it painful to navigate around, scrolling your weapon wheel, pressing the same numbers multiple times, or worse off having a quick-switch enabled leaving a player chaotically changing weapons in search for the one that would work. With the lack of zero-point field manipulator, creative combat aspect in Black Mesa hits a brick wall, the one it cannot surpass, as there is no environmental usage except the outdated fire barrels concept present that could influence the combat in unusual ways and the scripted events as collapsing environment on your enemies or breaking office floors from under the feet of enemies, is, ofcourse, not present, as this is something that the developers would struggle with, ignoring an excuse of «principle» of it being based off of Half-Life 1, as even the fan-made version of Xen is entirely different to the original. None of the true «reimagining» elements that could improve the game are realistically there and the player, in a shooter advertised by Valve in Half-Life 1 as the one the player must think in, both in Black Mesa and Half-Life 1 never quite reaches the realization of such a bold statement in the game itself. The puzzles in the game, too, are extremely simplistic and are still valve, plug, switch restricted, with no complex tasks being put on the player. With the game completely lacking any replayability, as always, there is unrealistically only one path to follow and there are no new ways of completing a level you could find. All of that 22 years later from Half-Life 1’s release in it’s «reimagining».




Speaking of Source Engine, it wasn’t truly in any way improved, especially technically. Maps are still tied to a low, restricted entity limit and the Hammer level editor is same as always. With maps still being short, Black Mesa with it’s lightning changes manages to look visually inferior to Half-Life 2 in most of the areas, all because it’s built on the same engine, but the game takes place in a facility on very old levels baked with low textures and mostly static lightning, the art refinement also being not on par with Half-Life 2 and it’s artistically outstanding European outdoors. MSAA antialiasing is now completely replaced with the worst alternative – FXAA. FXAA blurs the image and all of the jagged edges instead of completely removing them like MSAA does, due to the unspecified «artifacts» that MSAA generated with the «new and improved» source engine. Shortly after the game’s release MSAA was still usable and could be forced via a console command, the effect of which was removed in the newer updates, it however, did not create any artifacts, the only artifacts that are generated, the ones in the game right now with a complete lack of proper AA, the jagged edges that ruin the visual fidelity of the game even further than described above.


The H.E.V suit HUD interface is still as minimalistic as ever and could get an improvement in many areas with optional upgrades that could be customized by the player. The lack of certain quality-of-life improvements to the game is the result not of the developer principle at keeping the game as close to the original, but their expectable lack of experience in game development, lack of creativity and new ideas, hard development process, with the developers and even the lead himself completely changing in Crowbar Collective, with the game at the face of being cancelled. After all of that, the game being actually finished and not dropped halfway is commendable, however, the game advertising itself as a «reimagining» must deliver on much more than a simple remake, which it already strived away from with Xen. The game has to reach a much higher mark and standard, which was impossible with the developers such as this getting their hands on the project.

The soundtrack in Half-Life 1 was based on already existing samples, remixed to fit the environment of the game and certain areas better. Even though much more effort has gone into developing a Black Mesa soundtrack, it sounds more well orchestrated at pre-Xen levels, yet lacks a unique, relaxing and at the same time horror inducing technological vibe of the original composer’s soundtrack. Soundtrack in Black Mesa’s Xen levels contains an extremely long and over the time distracting female vocal voice integrated into nearly all Xen soundtracks with each soundtrack’s instrumentals, punch, ruined by it, overall making it sound much more unprofessional than it already was. It was generic and all the production quality of that soundtrack has gone into composer’s sexual perversions.

Can you spot the skybox line ?




Speaking of Xen and their take on reimagining all chapters with their own decisions, with the earlier earthbound levels being somewhat entertaining, Xen ends up being nothing but a complete drag, half of which is a walking simulator, once again, with no exploration, lack of explorable caves, let alone small and optional floating islands, which as it is completely unacceptable, the other half with the lack of puzzle ideas that focuses on plugs and even more platforming than in original Half-Life 1 puts down the whole game into the ground and outweighs any true possibility of recommending that game to anyone. For some it would be infuriating, for some the drag of it all would pull them to sleep, all because of a complete lack of direction and the confusion from the developers at what they were trying to actually do. There are a lot of iterations of Xen, art decisions they were trying to go for seen in Xen Museum, but the uncertainty of the developers and absolute lack of gamedesign with continuously dragging chase sequences, repetitive and repulsive art design in the second stage of Xen along with a poor lightning choice might catch up to anyone. Gone the «otherworldly» look of Xen, it’s eeriness and the potential for a disturbing atmosphere, it is now replaced with the bright blue and purple in a still static skybox, throttles, gasps of a Source Engine, full focus on linear caves and a complete absence of «strange» structures makes Xen look generic at best. Grunts were improved in development specifically for Xen, level design, however, is underutilized for their AI and dynamic battles, new and unique situations are missing at the haze of repetitiveness, unoriginality at any form, Gordon instead reaches an otherworldly, anticlimactic cruise island instead of an abysmal, terrifying monster infested world that should be the most challenging part of the game. If more full-work hours, development time went into the project at the non-remote studio with clear idea of what they were trying to do, the game could have been much better and not just mediocre and barely less than average at rare occasions.

Final verdict: