Black Mesa (PC) Game Review

This is  the first time I will be reviewing a game that is a remake, and after some thought, I have decided to write it as a comparison between the already great original Half-Life and this lovingly crafted fan-remake. Please note that I’ve never actually reviewed the original either, though - and due to my love for the series it’s likely I’ll ramble quite a bit about both the original and other Games in the series, too. But if you’re reading this in the first place, I’ll guess you’re either interested in my opinions, or  you like Half-Life….. oooor you’re some boring asshole looking for yet another stranger to harass online. *shrugs* With that out of the way, on to the game!—Black Mesa is a fan-made remake of the original Half-Life game, a sci-fi first person shooter made back in the 90s. If you haven’t played the original and aren’t squeamish about gory sci-fi action I definitely recommend it! I’m quite partial to the PS2 port of Half-Life as it has some nicely improved character and weapon models, and you don’t have to worry about any DRM crap.



So, where to start in the comparisons? Well, of course, you’ll immediately see the game is given a complete visual overhaul using the beautiful source engine, one of my favorite game engines to this day. Everything is immensely more detailed than the original and I found it a delight to look at. I loved the atmosphere and visuals of Half-Life 2 and since this uses the same engine, I was looking forward to seeing more like that. This game largely takes place within a massive network of fancy laboratories, industrial facilities and bits of desert wilderness - and they’re all wonderfully detailed and pleasant to look at. Visually, Xen (the last section of the game)  is kind of a mixed bag for me - it starts off incredibly beautiful but later on it does get into a lot of areas that are very murky and brown. While a bit aesthetically unpleasant, I feel it fits the thematic elements of the last few chapters to have the lush beauty of Xen gradually degrade into something unsettling. You are getting closer and closer to the final boss, which is an extremely unpleasant entity, both in appearance and motives.



The audio design has also been wonderfully overhauled. Another thing I love about the source engine is that its games tend to have wonderful ambient sounds that make the worlds feel so much immersive and alive. This game utilizes that wonderfully to make every area you visit drip with atmosphere, from a simple break room in the labs to the massive expanse of Xen. 

On the topic of audio, the soundtrack has also been remade. For me personally, this was one of the weaker changes to the game. The music wasn’t bad by any means, but most of it wasn’t memorable to me like Kelly Bailey’s original soundtrack. After playing through the whole game the only track that sticks out in my memory is the music when you first arrive in Xen, which features human vocals in the music, something pretty different for a Half-Life game, and it did do a good job on adding to the feeling of wonder.



The story itself has remained unchanged, and in case you haven’t yet had the opportunity to play this or the original, I’ll do my best to avoid spoilers (outside of the fact I already told you you’ll end up in another dimension at the end of the game). Smaller bits of narrative flavor have been added in, however.  Prior to the disaster, there are a whole lot of lovable scientists and security guards to interact with, and one welcome addition is that of actual *gasp* female scientists! This makes the line during the intro “black mesa in a equal opportunity employer” sound a bit more legitimate. This is quite a meaningful improvement to me, seeing that even though the gaming industry is still full of problems, it’s at-least improved in terms of being at-least a little less sexist than in the 90s. On the other hand, finding a bible added into in the game’s first lobby kind of grossed me out.. It felt out of place is a scientific research facility and I really got the vibe of this being the work of some creepy christian on the team sticking their dick (or vagina) in the yummy, warm, scientific mashed potatoes.




Now, of course, how does it play? Very well, I have to say. I found the initial movement setting really disorienting with the speed and motion blur, but the game offers plenty of options, including the ability to set Gordon to walk instead of run, and to disable screen tiling and motion blur effects. These were part of the original game, but I feel it worked better in that version because of the games much simpler visuals. When as much detail as Black Mesa has, it was a bit much for my eyes, plus it is the sort of the game that I wanted to take my time to slowly walk through and enjoy the atmosphere.




Level layouts have seen some changes, and occasionally incorporate game-play mechanics from Half-Life 2, such as physics-based puzzles. I’m quite fond of these as they mix up the game-play between all the combat and platforming. Xen is given a huge overhaul here, being MUCH longer than it was in the original and contains a great variety of cool game-play sequences. A lot of folks hated the original Xen, but I never felt quite as harshly towards it. The first time I beat Half-Life I recall Xen’s visuals did strain my eyes, but I think it was due to simply having a headache at the time. In my more recent play-through of it, the only part I disliked was fighting Nihlanth. thankfully, in Black Mesa, the Nihlanth battle is overhauled too, being much more fun and exciting. I’ve seen it compared to the badass boss fights of Doom 4, and I can definitely see the similarity.



The game is sometimes very hard, I will warn. I had to crank it down to the lowest difficulty once I encountered the human soldiers, and they still kicked my ass several times. These segments can get a bit frustrating, but if you make good use of quick saves and practice a lot you can eventually get through them.



So, do I recommend the game? Mostly….Mostly.

Unfortunately, I had some bad experiences related to steam  while playing through this - mainly that while playing through one of the game's chapters, an update was forced for the game (as steam likes to do) that was incompatible with my existing save files and forced me to restart my current chapter. When I reached out about this on the games forums, I had another player give me helpful tips on how to to roll back my game version so I could continue where I left off, but the a moderator came along and rather condescending ordered me to just stop using steam because the updates are always mandatory and what not. This soured my experience and I ended up needing to take a break for a bit before continuing the game the game because dwelling on the developers irresponsibility (just FINISH your game before you publish it!) and the moderators rudeness made it hard to enjoy this otherwise lovely game.




 However, I am somewhat pleased to say that you can actually get a hold of Black Mesa in mod form for free here https://www.moddb.com/mods/black-mesa/downloads/black-mesa-torrent However, note that this is likely an older version of this game and it may have missing or different content from the steam version. From all I’ve seen though, it should be very similar, and I imagine, quite fun.  It’s a nice option to have if you feel iffy about giving money to steam or the dev team, supporting drm, etc (Though sadly it's probably still chained to DRM in the sense that you need to rely on Valves servers to get the source sdk and such).