Black Mesa

Black Mesa is a community-made Half-Life remake to the Source engine, developed by Crowbar Collective. It was made partly as a result of the badly ported and almost unchanged Half-Life: Source not living up to the fans' expectations. It was originally released as a Half-Life 2 mod on September 14th, 2012, and was later made available as a standalone game via Steam on May 5th, 2015 as an early access title until on 2020 December 23rd after years of development, Xen the final chapter was complete with the game now considered fully developed after 16 years.

Why It Rocks

 * 1) Unlike mh:crappygames:Half-Life: Source, it is almost a complete remake of the critically acclaimed Half-Life, with impressive visuals and sounds, totally redesigned maps, new models, and dialogue recorded from scratch. Most of the models of the NPCs have recieved huge upgrades, now there more variety of models for the Scientists, Guards and the Marines. Scientists are no longer the same four models and they included a female version of them as well. The voices are very faithful to the source.
 * 2) * Unique character models were created for Eli Vance and Isaac Kleiner. Eli was portrayed with a generic scientist model in HL later retconned in HL2; in BM, Isaac replaces another generic scientist present with Eli.
 * 3) Great and challenging gameplay, perhaps edging more than its predecessor. Levels have been slightly remade to be less confusing and some chapters were shortened. Balances many things as well while keeping a very challengeing difficulty. For example, Questionable Ethics adds a HECU assault at the entrance of the lab after rescuing the scientists, and On a Rail was significantly cut to a shorter length.
 * 4) Outstanding soundtrack by Joel Nielsen, it has enhanced the atmosphere and conveys more emotion to the scenes in comparison to the original.
 * 5) As with Source engine games, the graphics are absolutely gorgeous! Quite an upgrade to Half Life 2 with more detailed models, pleasing textures and better lighting. Even before the full release, the visual were quite phenomal and still are today!
 * 6) It features a Deathmatch multiplayer mode, like the original game.
 * 7) Black Mesa includes subtle details weapon-wise, mostly not present in the official previous games, such as:
 * 8) * Unique sprinting animations while holding weapons in first-person view.
 * 9) * Different reloading animations for some firearms depending on whether the magazine is empty or not.
 * 10) * The player character's gloves and weapons can be dirtied by enemies' blood in close quarters combat.
 * 11) *While the Half life 2 reduced the dismemberement on enemies, Black mesa brings this back as now Shotguns or explosives can now explode them into body parts!
 * 12) *The Turrets can be grabbed like in Half Life 2 and can be reprogrammed once caught to kill the player's enemies.
 * 13) *The Long jump module no longer needs you to crouch to function, you simply need to press the jump button midair.
 * 14) Some elements were corrected to match their real-life counterparts. For example, the MP5 has a correct 30-round magazine capacity, and the U.S. Marines use the appropriate LAV-25 vehicle, as opposed to the Bradley IFV seen in the original Half-Life (which is used by the U.S. Army in reality).
 * 15) The Marines in the current release sound much more human (similarly to HL's expansion pack Opposing Force) compared to the original Half-Life, where they sounded robotic and sinister with radio effects on their whole dialogue. This is particularly an improvement over the 2012 release of Black Mesa, which had the Marines communicating with loud voices via radio (similarly to HL), and where their voice acting was somewhat forced and cheesy (albeit not robotic).
 * 16) The part set in the outer world Xen is an incredible improvement in comparison to the original Half-Life. The dimension no longer feels like plain asteroid islands and instead has actual biomes and expands more on the Black Mesa science team's exploration in the planet!

Bad Qualities

 * 1) It initially lacked the Xen part, which has been delayed multiple times; it was eventually released in 2019, seven years after the original Black Mesa release. The full release of the game was in 2020.
 * 2) Due to the Source engine not having been updated since 2013, the Steam release has a few noticeable glitches.
 * 3) It lags in some areas on certain chapters, including the major update on Surface Tension’s expanded area, and later sometime in "On a Rail", which it would lag suddenly when you trying to delivering the Rocket. Some players had frustration in trying to get the gameplay moving.

Videos
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