It really is a masterclass in remakes done right. The design changes they have made are few but extremely clever
Black Mesa is amazing! I’ve played through both Half-Life and Half-Life: Source many times over and Black Mesa blows both (not like Source is much better in the first place) out of the water. Honestly it’s difficult to recommend because one of the things that makes Black Mesa so impressive is how much they improved over the original so I feel the need to tell people to play Half-Life first, then Black Mesa.
Xen was also amazing! I see some comments here about not liking the Xen bosses which is fair enough but I loved them! Gonach (especially the very end) was quite difficult though. The end of Xen feels like a massive power trip too!
Only thing I didn’t like about Black Mesa was one of the revamped boss fights on Xen. It has the “you can’t kill me until you’ve run this gauntlet” vibe. Bitch please, I have a gluon gun I should be able to just vaporize you.
I enjoyed everything up to Gonarch’s lair.
Suddenly, you have this huge unkillable bullet sponge attacking you with everything from scenery, acid spit, swarms of baby spiders, constantly charging at you.
You’re supposed to double jump to avoid her, which you can’t because of all the debris, while pumping dozens of rockets into her.
It was completely unlike the Gonarch in the original game, which was more balanced with the overall difficulty setting.
It broke what was until that point, an incredibly fun game.
Forreal, especially because they don’t telegraph that she’s unkillable at certain points. You don’t find out until AFTER you’ve wasted all your ammo, but up until then your shots are still visually appearing to do damage and she still whimpers. Really dumb design.
It hurts more because I bought the game before Xen was ready and waited a long time to enjoy the last chapter.
I’ve never finished it.
If you can slog through the gonarch, I’d recommend it. There’s a sequence near the end where you start vaporizing everything with unlimited gluon gun ammo; it’s one of my favorite parts of the game.
