Just made it through the Lambda portal with 1 health left and…wow. That’s all I can say really. Just…wow.
Amazingly faithful to the original game while offering your own interpretation, incredibly well put together, insanely detailed (seriously, good job on that), surprisingly well acted, excellent soundtrack…
Simply put: This was a triumph. I’m making a note here, huge success.
I had such fun playing this, going through the levels in my head and comparing them to the original, seeing how, even though the levels were completely different, they were still utterly familiar. The sense of scale was impressive too. Black Mesa now actually feels like a massive research complex, rather than a series of interconnected areas.
While I was slightly disappointed at the lack of the bomb in the pipe scene, this was far outweighed by the now properly scaled “On A Rail” chapter, your own personal touches to things (the canyon bombing run and the dogfight above Lambda being my two personal favourites) and the general overall quality of the game.
When I first entered the test chamber right at the beginning, my jaw hit the floor and I actually said “oh wow”. In fact, I was driven to say that several times over during the course of this mod, something I hardly ever do once in response to a game, let alone multiple times.
The only real niggles I have with it, though, are:
The quick-load bug. I don’t know what causes it, but sometimes the game won’t take your quickload command. Sometimes it’s once, sometimes it’s multiple times. It does eventually take it and it’s more an irritant than anything else, but it’s there.
Difficulty. I was playing on normal, but this was way harder than I ever remember HL being at that level. Not necessarily a bad thing, depending on who you ask, but I was surprised by how frequently I was getting hurt bad or even dying. I also found the battle around the Lambda core to be quite…painful. The little mini-Nihilanths (what are they called, “Controllers”?) attacks really, really hurt.
To round this little mini-review off, here’s the link to my screenshot library for Black Mesa, wherein you’ll find pics I took of certain (in)famous locations or events throughout the game, as well as anything I saw that I thought amusing or cool. All 294 of them.
That’s about it really. This is truly an amazing accomplishment and something to be proud of having done, ladies and gents. I honestly can’t wait to see what you guys have done with Xen.
They’re waiting for you Gordon, in the border world…