BlackMesa

I’ve been involved with Half Life and related games since about 2002 when I bought the HL: Generation pack. I thoroughly enjoyed the mods and even helped out with a couple of them back in the day. I’m not exactly a person who’s fully conscious of the lore however, that’s one thing I’ve never paid any attention to with it. Still I am aware of the basics at least, so I’m not completely out of the loop.

Some years ago a small group decided to remake the original Half Life, which eventually ended up being released as a retail game in the steam store. Players were excited about it, giving rave reviews about how it upgraded the content and even elevated it to a higher level. I didn’t care much about it at the time, but recently I’ve had curiosity fool me into buying Black Mesa during the winter sale and oh boy, I was indeed fooled.

Black Mesa took Half Life and made it inherently worse, than it ever was.

Let’s start off by saying that design wise, the environments have been pointlessly expanded into corridors and pathways that lead to nowhere and do not add any extra worth to it at all. I’m an avid explorer, yet the more I played the less I wanted to walk around and discover, simply because there was no real reason to do so, or I was prohibited from entering areas that looked interesting enough. Navigation is painful, especially at the latter levels where you have no idea where to go, as your pathways are seemingly blocked by invisible walls and you’re barely being lead around with the exception of a very few light sources at very few moments. Hell, in some cases when there were forks in a road, I was contemplating on which way to go, then ending up with a level change, wherein I could not backtrack anymore. This annoyed me, as at first I was curious on what would have happened if I went the other way, so I reloaded a previous save game only to realize there was absolutely no reason for the other path to even exist, as I was not rewarded by anything at all.

This all becomes more and more frustrating later on, when you’re running low on health, and no medkits or healing stations are available anywhere, as you’re thrust into multiple escape sequences with 12 HP, where you simply cannot do anything but run around like a madman, hoping to find the correct path. Scripted sequences add more confusion when there’s no indication of it happening, so you waste your ammunition on a monster, that you’re not supposed to defeat. Heck, there’s an average enemy that turns out to be a full length level chase, where you are incapable of killing said enemy and are basically forced to run around like a moron, hoping that yet another sequence will be triggered, that opens up a previously blocked area.

What’s more, you can get punched in the face, sent flying outside the map, somehow between two blocks of clippings, being unable to do anything but killing yourself and reloading a save. There’s countless bad decisions that undermine the whole game, like jump puzzles being easily beaten through cheating as the developers forgot there’s a physics engine where you can simply stack boxes or barrels, skipping parts that are supposed to be challenging in a way. At other times enemies spawn right behind you from a room you just cleared out, because of some embarrassing choice that level designer had made.

A lot of things are padded to the extreme where they become really tedious and boring or simply dropping in quality. The start of XEN is the only promising part which ends up becoming not only rehashed half way, but very lazy. You get some very nice alien environment for a brief moment, after which you’re thrust back in time to HL1 era box maps reminiscent of Gunman Chronicles. Which wouldn’t be an issue if this was not a game that supposedly tried to aim to bring a 90’s game into the new era.

Then there’s combat, which a lot of the times is just you running around in panic, trying to take cover from an AI that’s using pin point accuracy, so much so that you get shot through doors and walls, not noticing where you’ve been killed from, except for rare instances where grunts guns poke through a closed door. But this is also an issue with aliens, as creatures like the Bullsquid spams it’s toxic, neon colored acid spit at you from 3 miles away, hitting you accurately in the head, not stopping until you pumped enough shotgun shells in it’s face. But while you’re trying to avoid the bombarding attacks, you find yourself running into a group of leeches, as their tongues are somehow extremely hard to spot in certain conditions.

Speaking of spotting: You need to have your flashlight almost constantly turned on, as the levels are badly lit and nearly always hard to see. Biggest joke in this regard being, that if you dare try to pump up the brightness, the game becomes darker. Why? Because SOMEHOW the person responsible for the UI managed to REVERSE the controls, so the less bright you change your settings to, the more you get of it. Excuse me, how in the hell did you manage to fuck this up? It’s a base setting of the source engine, you’d have to deep dive into the code and flip it for this to happen. This couldn’t have been a simple accident.

Then there’s the fact that the new music does not fit at all for the game, and gets triggered by random ass events, making it very obvious what had caused it. It’s also extremely loud, even if you tinker with the volume settings and has no easing in when played. Sounds are either recycled or used from the general series sound FX packs, while what seems to be custom just feels off for one reason or another.

The final boss is also as tedious as much as it’s ridiculous, that could be described with the old meme of: “How much FX do you want? All of it.” I’m more amazed that the engine could handle the onslaught of particles and whatnot during the final battle, but I’m not at all impressed by the fight itself. You just run around, trying to survive, waiting for a turn to attack. Anything but fun.

I can’t tell you how disappointed I am with the end product. Everyone kept hyping it up through out the years and claiming how much better this version of Half Life is, but in truth it felt like your typical mod or fangame with bad choices ruining even the better ideas and creating a lackluster or frustrating experience. I played the game through while streaming it to friends and we were all baffled at how the general public perceived this bug ridden, mostly badly designed, over-padded of a game.

It’s simply not good enough, the most it deserves is a 3/10.