If my knowledge of Black Mesa was based on what I've read in this thread recently, I'd assume it's as much of a shitshow of a mod as Hunt Down The Freeman. Not to mention that 99.9% of criticisms boil down to "it's not like Half-Life", in which case I believe you're looking for this mod for your painstakingly accurate experience of Half-Life on Source:
https://www.moddb.com/mods/half-life-source-fixed
As for me, my last stop in progression was at the Vortigaunt town or whatever, where some of them are getting beaten up, and I do feel like it's starting to fall apart at Xen, but I'm not gonna be all "BM sucks dick". You want Half-Life, go play Half-Life.
My criticisms so far that I agree with are:
- the HECU fights were really fucking intense and felt more like a chore with how bullet spongy the grunts are, but it didn't push me to my brink of annoyance, and in a way I felt a sense of accomplishment because I felt like I was just about to die as I was taking hits after hits, but those fights were always full of items to keep the odds in your favor
- the music is way too loud. I get it that they're good compositions but it's too loud and the music slider doesn't seem to affect it. I had to reload a quicksave to listen to the third EAS broadcast because it was too silent, went further because I thought it was coming from some other room, and then the music was too loud for me to hear it
- Xen does feel like it's a separate thing altogether, where that Lambda Complex teleporter becomes the split between a decent reimagining of HL1 and something completely new.
Okay, BM Xen. I can't give them too much shit for doing it from scratch, since they've already taken plenty of liberties in changing up the old HL1 campaign a bit, and I liked that because it felt more fresh than just the same game with better visuals, and the original Xen was very short and very simple because Valve didn't have time to flesh it out more.
Maybe let's start with the positives because I feel like I'm the only one that gives any credit to BM while the rest of the thread just shits relentlessly on it.
The visuals and the soundscape are great, top notch, 10/10. I love the inclusion of abandoned BMRF stations and HEV zombies, they've properly fleshed out the failed expeditions into the border world with those beyond slapping a bunch of HEV wearing bodies around. It wasn't all just platforming and there were puzzles like getting the power in the abandoned station running, or the whole puzzle segment to set up the portal to the Gonarch level.
Is it excessively drawn out? Probably. Is it better than HL1? Yes, undeniably, HL1's Xen was disproportionately short to the rest of the game. They shouldn't have dragged it out to be as long as the main campaign but they also shouldn't stay faithful to the original that was unfinished by Valve's admission.
Oh yeah, at the final puzzle to enable the portal when I didn't realize that the ground door got opened and I had to get the longer cable, I had a softlock where the shorter cable wouldn't insert into the broken socket, and I had to reload the autosave to try again. This was the first real QA issue I've encountered in Xen.
Now, the Gonarch's Lair. This is where I felt this new vision of Xen started to fall apart, but strictly in the game design sense, let's not sperg about how it's not 1:1 HL1. BM wants to be something different so I will give it shit for it's game design, not it's faithfulness.
The first fight is rather straightforward in an open area. However when you start going after the Gonarch, it starts to fall apart a bit. The parts where you have to burn down the growth to progress further had a moment where I was using flares and that worked, but the third gas plant wouldn't light up with a flare. I stalled there for a bit until I looked up that you can just shoot those, and that worked. Major QA issue number two.
Then the entire segment where you're getting chased by the Gonarch and you have Houndeyes and Headcrabs to fight off as you run away, this aggro'd me way more than the HECU fights, because I had no idea if the Gonarch is still behind me or not, and where to go, and it felt like the game was trying it's best to drain me of ammo, health and armor before the big fight. The part where you get locked up with a shitton of headcrabs and you have to ignite a gas plant was also bullshit, and then shit like running around trying to kill the little headcrabs to wait for the detonator to drop through the ceiling. A lot of the shit before the big fight felt more like an annoying punishment than fun and linear gameplay.
Then there was the big chase with the Gonarch in a fairly open space level where I thought I could kill it, but it was a scripted sequence before the real fight. Something went really wrong that they've made it feel like you can fight it right here right now, I wasted my rockets and I was in this constant mental state that I will be out of ammo when the fight actually happens. And when I didn't knew where to run and got hit by the Gonarch at those crystal walls, I got deadlocked because of the low gravity and the level of aggro they gave to the Gonarch.
Not to mention how the level geometry, the water segments and the way movement is done meant I was constantly stalling on weird edges or had issues swimming. There were also cases of me clipping through geometry at that crystal wall with the Gonarch and one ledge in the "break water seals to flood the area to ascend" puzzle zone that looked like that's where I'm meant to go but it was a background element that wasn't the way forward. Major QA issue number three.
By the end of it all when the fight actually happened, obviously the game gave me an abundance of meds, armor and rockets so I could fuck the walking testicle's shit up good, so in the end all that buildup of me feeling like I'm being punished to make the final fight harder was unnecessary.
So far I've enjoyed Black Mesa and it's vision of Xen, but it's clear that with Xen, them doing everything from scratch has led to issues in the gameplay, and this is where I will give them shit. The rest however is a very, very solid
reimagining of HL1 that's great to play through, and because it didn't try to be 1:1 like HL1 it feels fresh. Every location is expanded in size and detail and parts like the missile silo no longer feel like those oddly claustrophobic segments, and at the very beginning it's much more fun to fuck around the Anomalous Research labs before the inevitable happens. The extra NPC voice lines, the extra interactivity, it's a good way of fleshing out HL1.
As I've mentioned before, adding Kleiner and Eli and other retroactive details like that is great, and I like how they found a VA that does an on-point impression of Kleiner but got someone that's slightly off of it for the generic scientists. A lot of the decisions make sense and feel right, like reusing HL2 assets for the G-Man, Vortigaunts, Headcrabs and so on, even if it feels out of place since this is HL1, but again, this is HL1 in Source, it makes sense to do this for this slight amount of continuity where Valve didn't care for it at all. You could give Valve way more shit for the idiocies they've done in HL2 and it's episodes than you could Crowbar Collective and how they've handled their vision of HL1.
But anyway, during my playthroughs I was also watching Freeman's Mind and I'm about to finish the series, so I'll go do that now since I think I was being too positive about Black Mesa for this thread and I'm bound to be yelled at for not nitpicking and hating every single detail of it.
