Evan Omo

Black Mesa Game Review

Before we get started, in order to make this review easier on readers I have split the review into different segments which focus on certain parts of the game. Hope you enjoy the long read. Warning: Spoilers Ahead! Introduction The fan made remake of the video game Half-Life, one of the best first person shooters of all time changed how story telling is done since it was released in November of 1998. For years, fans of Valves iconic Half-Life series have wondered if Half-Life was ever going to be properly remade on the Source engine which is used in Half-Life 2 and its episodes. Well fans of the series dont have to wait any longer as their wish has come true.

Oh, you mean the graphics in this game arent good enough?

Black Mesa was released in September of 2012 to positive reviews and it has been very well received among fans of the series. The developers have spent more than half a decade working on the game in their spare time which is no easy task and deserves a lot of credit. When you first start the campaign it becomes immediately apparent that this game is not just a one to one remake of Half-Life. Its not a straight port of Half-Life either since the reasoning behind creating this game in the first place was that Valves own Half-Life Source left a lot of gamers underwhelmed at the port. In Half-Life Source, most of the maps still kept their original textures and only minor improvements were implemented such as high quality water effects, physics effects such as ragdolls, and better texture filtering. Black Mesa blows both the original HalfLife and Half-Life Source out of the water in terms of bringing a visually stunning overhaul in the maps, improved physics puzzles, use of cinematic physics, enjoyable scripted sequences, and also being a refined and breathtaking remake while still remaining faithful to the source material.

Evan Omo

This scientist just loves standing underneath this door. Fortunately this bug is not present in the remake.

Story Black Mesa pushes the source engine to its limits and compared to Half-Life, the maps are much larger, more detailed and the facility feels much more alive than in the original game. The iconic tram ride that is used as an in game introduction in the Inbound chapter is very impressive. As you wind up in the Sector C area of the facility, the security guards and scientists do a great job of talking to the player and if you stick around you can pick up some of the many humorous lines heard throughout the chapter. As you dawn your H.E.V. suit, two retconned characters named Eli Vance and Isaac Kleiner who you interact with in Half-Life 2, make an appearance in this mod which is a nice touch.

Have we met before?

Evan Omo Then the time comes to enter the test chamber to take part in the teleportation experiment. When the scientists working on preparing the experiment tell you that they have taken all of the necessary precautions and nothing can go wrong, you know something is going to happen especially when it deals with opening up portals to another dimension. Sooner than later almost as if you were to predict it, the experiment does inevitably go horribly wrong and alien creatures start teleporting in all over the facility causing untold amounts of death and destruction.

Oh crap, all hell is breaking loose.

In Half-Life when you first recover from the initial disaster there is not much time to take in the scenery as you find your crowbar shortly after the chapter starts and you begin killing enemies. Black Mesa changes things up for the better. After the disaster strikes, instead of picking up the crowbar at the beginning of the level, you end up having to rely on a security guard and flares to stay alive and open up a path to continue on. I think these new mechanics really help to give the chapter a lot of good atmospheric detail and adds a little bit of tension for the player. Once you do get your crowbar then it becomes a matter of surviving and gaining more powerful weapons to use against the onslaught of demons teleporting in from he- I mean aliens teleporting in from another dimension. Once you make it to the surface however, the military arrives and its a shock thinking they are here to help, when it becomes clear how wrong you are. The marines are there to kill any witnesses that are associated with the Black Mesa incident.

Evan Omo

Which includes you. These guys dont mess around.

As you go through each chapter you meet different security guards and scientists each with their own unique lines and faces. When comparing the NPCs or non player characters in Half-Life the security guards all had the same model and the scientists had very limited model variety. This was one of the technical limitations of the Gold Source engine and it shows today. Black Mesa improves this element of the game by using the face creation system which gives each spawned NPC a random and unique face as well as other model accessories. This applies to the military soldier models as well. When you arrive at the Advanced Biological Research Lab or Biodome Complex which is in the Questionable Ethics chapter, at the end of the chapter after you get to use a new experimental gun that shoots particle disrupter tau beams (how awesome is that), you encounter one of the hardest fights of the game. The military drops in and you have to dispatch the soldiers very quickly otherwise they can get the drop on you.

This is one tough fight. Better get my awesome particle gun ready.

Evan Omo Before you know it, you have made it to the Sector G Hydro Electric Dam area and this is where the action in the game really picks up. As you move throughout the Surface Tension chapter you witness air strikes from jets flying by, ospreys dropping off troops, and you encounter an attack helicopter, a tank, and an LAV which you must destroy in order to move forward. The areas in this chapter have been significantly expanded from its Half-Life counterpart and the gameplay elements really show off the Source engine improvements with the epic scripted sequences and set pieces. There was a section that had a flying osprey which drops off unlimited soldiers and you have to use a RPG or Rocket Propelled Grenade launcher to destroy the Osprey. You can also use the TOW cannon to take out the Osprey if you run low on RPG rounds. This section was the hardest part of the game for me since if you dont take out the Osprey quickly then the soldiers will be onto your position very fast and you will succumb to frustration partly due to the marines aggressive AI which I will talk about later on.

When you arent engaged with any enemies, the maps, visually at least are particularly gorgeous to look at.

Finally, after trudging through the non stop chaos caused by the military and the alien invasion you make it to the Lambda Complex. The scientists are very grateful that you have made it this far and as the player you feel like you have accomplished a lot of objectives along the way. The size of the Lambda teleporter is ginormous and provides a great sense of journey as you travel from the bottom of the teleporter all the way to the top of it where the final scene of the game takes place. As you jump into the portal to travel to the alien world called Xen in hopes of closing the rift that has opened between Xen and Earth, the game abruptly ends at this final scene where the screen fades to black and the credits roll. The developers have stated that they are working on Xen and will release it as a separate stand alone section of the game once the Black Mesa game gets released on Steam. Even though many people find this decision controversial in that Black Mesa in the state its in now is an unfinished game, this will result in the Xen chapters being of much higher quality. In Half-Life, many gamers argued that the weakest part of the game were the chapters taking place on Xen due to the weak story elements, the tedious platforming puzzles, and the repetitive nature of the gameplay mechanics. The developers hope to rectify and refine the Xen chapters to achieve a good level of polish like the rest of the locations in Black Mesa.

Evan Omo

You didnt think that there would only be one gorgeous shot of the landscape did you?

Gameplay One of Black Mesas greatest strengths is its solid gameplay. From the weapon combat to the movement around obstacles, the controls feel smooth and responsive. Sprinting and being able to quickly change weapons, aim your weapon and shoot and kill enemies feels like an adrenaline filled roller coaster that you dont want to end. A major theme of the Half-Life games involves using your environment to your advantage. You see this element sprinkled throughout the game. You can shoot explosive barrels to kill nearby enemies, set up traps using tripmines and satchel charges, and in the Questionable Ethics level you can use sterilizers to kill all the enemies in a room if you can activate the device fast enough. Being able to teleport to different destinations is done very well in the Lambda Core chapter and the teleporter feels like a real device that you can use to get around easily.

Like this.

Black Mesa like the other Half-Life games does a great job with pacing. One chapter will be filled with you engaged in fire fights with marines and other aliens while another chapter will have you jumping across conveyor belts and avoiding machines that could slice or crush you

Evan Omo instantly if you get too close. This element keeps the gameplay from getting too repetitive and boring which some other games especially open world games have a habit of doing. However there could be a bit less platforming throughout the game. The loading times of each of the sections in the game can be a little long but its acceptable considering how much detail is being packed into the maps. Also there were a few minor bugs throughout the game as well as a couple of game crashes and frame rate drops at a few points. Sound The sound design is another great aspect that the developers have implemented well. The guns sound strong, the enemies sound menacing, and the explosions add a defening boom around you when they go off. The environmental sounds provide a great way of making the maps feel like things are happening around you instead of just occurring because you are there. While the voice acting does not sound as good as the voice acting in Half-Life, the dialog spoken in Black Mesa is adequate in that the scientists and security guards have their own distinct personalities and they do keep the story going through giving more information to the player. I noticed throughout my playthrough that I would stop what I was doing just so I could listen to the lines of my companions and see if they would give me more information about what was going on in a certain situation. What makes the dialog also very cool to listen to is the developers have added over 6,500 unique lines of dialog which helps to keep immersion deep in the game. Having NPCs repeat the same lines over and over again such as was the case in Half-Life got a bit old so its not nearly as noticeable in Black Mesa. There is a lot more variety in the dialog and it made me feel like the friendly characters were real humans who I wanted to prevent from dying.

Its always nice to have a little extra fire power from your allies.

Annoyances You knew this was coming didnt you. For all the things that a video game does perfectly, there is always some complaint that people have with a particular game. Fortunately for Black Mesa most of the issues that I will be describing can be fixed either by modifying the game itself or by

Evan Omo installing additional fan created files that aim to fill in some of the minor inconsistencies made by the developers. The first minor annoyance that I had with Black Mesa was the inclusion of a heavy use of crouch jumping. Now I am NOT complaining about crouch jumping itself. I think its a good mechanic but it has to be balanced. Half-Life had a few areas where you had to crouch jump in order to progress through vents and get up on crates. The problem with Black Mesa is that the developers made it so you have to crouch jump to get over just about EVERYTHING. Even jumping over small gaps, you think you can just do a regular jump to get over it but nope that doesnt work. Jumping onto small crates even requires a crouch jump when in Half-Life you could perform a regular jump to get to the equivalent area. One particular area that made me hate crouch jumping to this extent was the room in the Unforeseen Consequences chapter where I had to use crouch jumping to reach the next huge crate that was dangling over a giant drop to the water below. Specifically in order to get to the next crate I had to press W to move forward, Shift to sprint, Space to jump and C to crouch all in very quick succession in order to get across a gap. It was tough to perform those key strokes quickly and I dont need to get cramps in my fingers just because the player has to crouch jump over most of the obstacles that are in the way. Whats great though is you can change the height of the jump value in one of the games text files to a higher number and this minor annoyance will be solved. You still have to crouch jump onto certain objects but not nearly as often as before.

However, these sections of the game havent gotten any easier.

The second minor annoyance was the aggressive marine AI that I mentioned earlier. Its not that they are hard to fight, its the fact they react to you instantly which I find unrealistic. Its nice to be able to get the drop on a marine or two every once in a while, so by changing the delay time of the readiness of the AI to a higher value you can make the fights a little more fun for the player. These next annoyances have more to do with some of the sounds and music just not sounding like they belong in a Half-Life game. The original health pickup, suit recharge, ammo pickup, H.E.V. suit pickup sounds and a few others are not present in the mod which is a bit of a buzz

Evan Omo kill since those sounds are present in Half-Life and some are even carried over and used in HalfLife 2 and its episodes. While the replacement sounds are ok, they arent nearly as good as the originals. Same goes with some of the music tracks in Black Mesa. The music is very appealing to listen to. Some music pieces fit in beautifully such as the ones from the Inbound chapter and Surface Tension but some tracks just dont work in the game for me such as the Black Mesa theme and the tracks that play in the Office Complex chapter. If you do want to change a few of the music and sound files then its just a matter of navigating to the correct directory and replacing the files that you want to modify. So this annoyance can be easily fixed. One last thing that bugged me was that in both the On a Rail and Surface Tension chapters, there were large chunks of the chapters that were cut in the final release. Now the reasoning behind this with On a Rail was because the chapter was too long and tedious in the original so the developers wanted to streamline the chapter which I can understand. But with Surface Tension the reason that it was cut was because one of the level designers ended up leaving the team so therefore the chapter was shortened. Shortening the Surface Tension chapter hurt the story because by then an all out conflict between the military and the aliens is apparent and the military was supposed to be shown getting beaten by the aliens. In the stock version of Black Mesa the military are shown to be winning so when the next chapter starts it is strange how the military has to pull out because of the alien threat. Again, this annoyance has also been addressed as there is a mod that adds several additional scenes to Surface Tension and On a Rail which fills in more of the story and adds more gameplay time to the mod.

These maps integrate seamlessly while providing an enhanced experience.

Evan Omo Conclusion Overall, Black Mesa is an amazing and stunning game that has gorgeous environments, great gameplay mechanics, a refined and improved storyline compared to the original game and establishes some consistency between it and the later Half-Life games such as using the same vortigaunt, headcrab, and barnacle models seen throughout the series. Most of the annoyances that are in the game can luckily be fixed to improve the experience and the best advantage is that this game is free to play. Now is Black Mesa a replacement for Half-Life? No its not. I consider them two different games with each having their own play styles. Even if you have never played the original Half-Life you should still appreciate and try out this wonderful game. Heck, you should play the original Half-Life first then Black Mesa afterward to compare the differences that this remake has to offer. The Good Visually impressive maps Solid and fine-tuned gameplay Faithful to the original game while still implementing new components The Bad Xen chapters not included in initial release Minor gameplay bugs, a couple game crashes, and some frame rate drops in certain areas A bit too much platforming Final Result My rating with no tweaks or modifications added: 8/10 * My rating with most of the annoyances fixed: 9/10 * Its recommended to play the mod with the additional fixes that I mentioned in this review as this will improve the game experience for the player while still retaining the nostalgic feeling of the original. You can also watch my custom Black Mesa trailer here, http://www.youtube.com/watch? v=YCdTnnMssF4