Several months ago I’ve decided to replay original Half-Life and it’s official expansions and it was done mostly due to this game I’m going to talk right now. Black Mesa is a full remake of the original Half-Life made by a huge team of fans over the course of the last 15 years and it went from being a fan response mod to the buggy Half-Life: Source to a completely standalone commercial release permitted by Valve. I originally played both the old 2012 mod release and the commercial version in Early access about 5 years later but didn’t get too far. It felt rough, some balancing changes were pretty bad and overall I didn’t have much hope in the project. Now that it’s out as a full game, I gotta say that the polishing the game received over all these years is pretty amazing. Even if a lot of my original concerns turned out to stay true.
If you’ve already played the original Half-Life, you know what to expect. While all of the levels from the original were redone, especially in the Xen chapters in the end, the flow remains the same, so does the story, the gameplay and main ideas of the game. It’s still an FPS with lots of varied sequences and ideas, some seemingly restored from the underused concepts of the original, some downplayed. Game still has a lot of focus on navigation and puzzles, even if not as much as the action part. And despite being updated in many ways, the game still has that late 90s-mid 2000s FPS feel to it that’s been all but lost nowadays.
Yet, despite feeling like that sporting the Source engine that is very outdated by modern standards, Black Mesa can look pretty darn good. It runs nicely, has a great look to it that tries to recreate the feel of the original Half-Life, but with the touches of Half-Life 2 and its episodes and manages to look really good in 2020. Also has some good sexy anamorphic lens flares.
Same cannot be said about the music which has some good tunes, remixes of old tracks or new bits, but overall feels out of place. While classic tracks by Kelly Bailey can often sound “old” they never feel outdated, having a very distinct style to them and wearing it proudly, tracks used in Black Mesa more often than not sound like bad cover versions done by starting musicians in the 90s. Or sound well produced but ridiculously out of place, like most of the Xen’s soundscape for whatever reason directed to have female voice singing over ethereal tunes, even when the original game had intense tribal beats, like during the Gonarch fight. That, with the fact that the audio mix is completely off and music sounds loud no matter what seemingly adequate setting you choose for it, makes the audio part of the game far less enjoyable than that of the original.
But for more people, I expect, its the gameplay and the level design that will play a bigger role in enjoyment of Black Mesa or lack of it. And for the most part, I’m surprised at how fun the game is nowadays. I was initially irked at the lack of difficulties lower than Normal (and to be fair, I still am), but Normal is so well balanced compared to how it used to be 8 years ago when it was a mod. The speed, the animations, the damage, the AI of the enemies, it’s all really well done and even with the occasional weird AI glitches, the game never felt janky. Not by mod standards or budget title standards, but by high quality standards. Most of the level changes and updates, especially when they weren’t introducing completely new sections into the game, were amazing. Some of the new additions felt great. Rethinking how each section plays out and how they can push the usage of certain weapons was far better than the original. Lots of puzzles were redesigned to have physics and they feel good. And even the dreaded crouch jumping, while still unfortunately present, can now be turned to automated in the settings menu.
Yet, there’s one defining feature of Half-Life that for whatever reason was killed in most sections of the game – the openness of levels and the ability to backtrack. While Black Mesa does allow you to move back and forth between maps occasionally, in most of the places where you always had several maps available to you at the same time in Half-Life (even if you never needed to go back), you just cannot go back in this game. Doors and gates lock behind you or when you do something elsewhere in the level, things blow up where they never did in the original or you just get some ugly and obvious invisible walls, but Black Mesa locks you out all the time. Game is also made far more, well, modern – far more linear. Sections which were optional in the original are now required, sections that had several entrances and exits and several ways to complete your goal are no straight lines, like most of Surface Tension is just either one line or parallel lines you can go through, with no way to backtrack or explore both roads, game always locking you out of the ability to explore everything. And it’s dreadful.
It could be excused if it was not also paired with another huge problem with redesign Black Mesa has – it’s lack of understanding when enough is enough. So many parts of the game are extended beyond reason. Already mentioned Surface Tension is far longer than it ever was in the original game, but a far bigger offender is Xen. It was a noble idea to make Xen closer in quality and richness to what Valve originally envisioned and to the rest of the game. And I love how it looks, how it introduces new fauna that makes sense and goes well with the already established style of the main game (unlike whatever Gearbox invented in Opposing Force back in the day). I love how the long jumps were redesigned, how lots of puzzles in it work, how some bits of story which were vaguely implied in the original have more attention and interesting detail.
Yet it just never ends. A tiny stealth or escape section with a Gargantua from the original game is now an extended escape sequence with dozens of Gargantuas. A simple room is now a level with mini-cutscenes and world building. One island with jumping puzzles is now about 3 levels with long puzzles and new mechanics. Replaying Half-Life took me about 8 hours. Playing Black Mesa – 13. And I didn’t feel like any of those 5 hours were needed or added to the experience. On the contrary, I’d say. Especially since unlike main parts of the game, Xen also features some ridiculously 90s design decisions of “yeah, that tiny thing out of the way is how you progress” or “an if you do this you just die because we scripted it like that”.
It’s not to say that I didn’t enjoy Black Mesa. I liked it a lot. It’s a really good remake and a really good FPS on its own. Its start is, though, far better than its finish and by the end I got really tired of playing it. Yet it is a really-really good game. Would I recommend playing it over the original Half-Life? On one hand, yes – if you’re not familiar with the original and you’ve never had experience with some of the older, and sometimes outdated, concepts in games and especially if you’ve started playing games post-Half-Life 2, you might enjoy this far more than you’d enjoy the original. Yet, I would still personally view the original Half-Life as a better game. It lasts as long as it needs to, it has more curious ideas and decisions than this more conventional remake and it has the vastly superior soundtrack. The gunplay, though… Yeah, the gunplay feels so much nicer in Black Mesa…