Beaten on: 4/14/22 Difficulty: Normal
Hours Played: 14
Rating: 6.5/10

A couple notes before I jump in to it. The first, is that I streamed this game so my experience was probably a little different than if I had played this offline. The other note is that I haven’t played Half-Life 1, which I would probably recommend most people do before playing Black Mesa.

I should also mention my score is based on my perception of games in 2022, I’m not considering that the original game was released in 1998.

For anyone that doesn’t know, Black Mesa is a re-imagining of Half-Life 1. It more or less follows the same storyline as Half-Life 1, from what I understand, and I thought it would be fun to play as a fan of the series. I went in thinking it was a remaster and was told by my chat that while the story is mostly the same, there were a lot of tweaks in the gameplay and small changes to basically everything that I’m sure effect how the whole game feels.

Overall the game was really enjoyable. Black Mesa is a sci-fi FPS that has you accidentally triggering a disaster that sets off a chain reaction of events that continue for multiple games. After you trigger the disaster, the game has you escaping the area and retrieving what will become the series’ iconic crowbar. This is actually where my first gripe about the game starts. The game doesn’t hold your hand at all, which I love for the record, but some things just aren’t obvious. There’s a hallway towards the beginning of the game that has some scripted events where it catches on fire and you get your crouching tutorial walking under the flames. You’re then supposed to crouch through a broken door that does not look like it will fit a grown man, so I didn’t even try it. I googled what you were supposed to do, and I (naively) read a Half-Life 1 guide that told you to look for a crowbar. Well the crowbar isn’t there in Black Mesa and I was immediately a little soured on the experience all from an asset that wasn’t scaled well. Experiences like this happened throughout the game. I can’t say if this is exclusive to Black Mesa or if that’s just how Half-Life 1 is, but it definitely made for a few frustrating moments when I missed the specific environmental clue I was supposed to see.

As an aside, the issue with the door was likely that I’m playing on an ultrawide and the FOV for the game only goes up to 90 in the menu, so things were probably a little skewed. By the way, why would you implement 3440x1440 support and not have an FOV that goes above 90??? Thankfully chat told me I could set it via console commands.

This seems like a good place to mention the game’s settings. There are a lot of them, which is always good, but some of the things that are on by default are just gross. There’s a head bob setting that I just can’t imagine anyone wanting to use. If you really want to include features like that, please don’t turn them on by default. The audio is another thing I want to mention, and since it’s tangential to settings, I’ll add it here. The game is, by default, mixed so poorly. The guns are SO LOUD. At an otherwise comfortable level, the guns were painfully loud and the worst part is they’re linked to the sound effects volume, so you have to miss out on some of the sound effects to have a tolerable level for the guns. Just a lot of little things like that that make for a less satisfying package experience.

I’m not going to go over the whole story of the game because anyone that’s played HL1 is probably familiar with the story, and anyone that hasn’t should stop reading and go play it.

There aren’t many levels that stick in my head as really good or really bad, I think everything was about a 7 the whole way through. The atmospheric storytelling is great. The puzzles are just right to feel engaging, but they’re never really challenging or tedious. There’s a decent amount of platforming in the game as well, which isn’t amazing by today’s standards, but is definitely serviceable and fun, especially with the quick save system. The only level I will mention specifically is the last level. I really enjoyed the environment change-up but the last 2 hours of the game is like 90 minutes of auto-scroller broken up by puzzles and it just really ruined the pacing for me.

Like you go from this really sick boss battle that’s very unique compared to the rest of the game, then you go through an auto-scrolling segment very similar to the boss battle you just did, then you get to a new environment where you… do another auto-scroller. There is a lot of flavor in the last levels of the game, but the gameplay just falls a little short in an otherwise solid experience.

Also, the last boss battle is just laughably bad. I spent way longer than I needed to on a segment of the battle and I barely took damage, and never came close to dying. You can, at least on normal, just circle strafe and beat the boss. Like zero strategy, zero tense moments, just run around in a circle shooting and it was super anticlimactic. If it was something in the middle of the game I think it would have had less of an impact on my overall perception, but it was the second to last thing I did in the game.

I am glad I played the game, and I definitely intend to do a modded playthrough of Half-Life 1 at some point. It made the story of Half-Life 2 make way more sense, and I think my next playthrough will be that much better because of it. I just wish it had a little less jank throughout and a stronger finish. It didn’t need much to push it to a 7.5 or 8.

I also wanted to mention there’s a documentary on YouTube that covers the making of this game I’m looking forward to watching, and there’s also a Black Mesa: Blue Shift in development (I think by a different team, but with the same concept in mind) that will be remaking the Half-Life 1 Blue Shift expansion, that follows a security guard throughout the events we just experienced as Gordon.