Black Mesa

In 1998, Sierra On-Line published Half-Life, a sci-fi thriller first-person shooter by Valve. It has since been called one of the greatest games, as it was an FPS whose story was actually narrated like a novel (for once, the press rejoiced), and was also known for the sheer beauty of the graphics, its ability to maintain a tense mood throughout, and supplanting the basic framework Quake laid for shooters to follow for years to come. Then in 2004 came the inevitable. A sequel was released, and for the same reasons it is also considered one of the greatest games. It was powered by the Source engine, whose might it could communicate better than any other title before or since, although it was not the first game to run on it. That game was Half-Life: Source, from the same year. It was essentially Valve's straight port of its 1998 classic to its newer Source engine, and, although it had some improvements such as level selection and water reflections, its critics saw it as a non-worthy upgrade that only served to divide the Half-Life community. However, it also inspired a team of upset fans to take their off time to embark on their own Source-based remake, built from the ground up and seeking to suture the communal rift Half-Life: Source created. For a long time, only the climactic levels of the game, the Xen world, were left out as unfinished, but after sixteen years of development, they were finally added in 2020. Was the wait well worth it, or did Crowbar Interactive squander all those years in what could be the most spectacular disappointment in at least a decade of gaming?

Black Mesa is an attempt to displace, or rather improve upon in its favor, Valve's own Source conversion. The remake starts off as in HL:S, with a splash screen, the in-game main menu background, and the familiar menus themselves, but with a difference: the splash screen is of Crowbar Interactive, the menu background is a level preview, and the menus' user interface is altered. The moment the game is begun, the player knows what to expect from it. While on board a train car, everything is larger, upscaled, and better contoured, the tone of which is felt throughout, and up ahead await Half-Life 2-based physics and puzzles to exploit and solve. Also noteworthy is the game's shift towards more roomy architecture, less so simple halls and tunnels, while still maintaining a linear gameplay.

There is not much else to say about the design changes, other than that there is more world scripting and interactivity and the characters are given more dialogue. Everything that made the original Half-Life great remains intact, only properly updated to take advantage of Source's capabilities, so I am getting to the point. The enemies' behavior is more sophisticated and their design made to match the style of the sequel. Some of the assets, such as the headcrab and the barnacle, are directly ripped from the sequels. On the behavior side, they are similarly comparable to the sequels, but some of their attacks are given an upgrade. The bullsquid, which used to spit acid in straight lines, now spits it spread out a little, the acid affected by gravity. It takes more than a little strafing to dodge its attacks, and if I am not mistaken, the player can even take damage from the acid splashing off nearby walls. An HECU soldier's grenade can actually be picked up by the player and tossed back at him. As a disclaimer, I only tested the game on the Hard difficulty setting, the actual difficulty of which seems comparable to the original, if not a tad tougher, to the best of my memory. The alien controllers, as first encountered when Gordon waits to jump into the portal to Xen in the Lambda Complex, make a shrilling sound that combined with their better clarified behavior is actually twice as terrifying, or at least the least bit so, compared to the original's screeches. My only quibble is the absence of leeches, small creatures that dwell in the water along with the much larger ichthyosaur. I did not think they were detrimental to the game's quality. Even a security guard says he will stay behind and not expose himself to sewage water laden with leeches, which apparently exist somewhere.

And now the moment of truth. Were the Xen levels worth waiting 16 years for? The answer is definitely. The moment Gordon breathes into the Borderworld, the player is in for a surprise. Everything is rebuilt from the ground up, and the presentation is an absolute spectacle, surrounded by flora and fauna, many landscaped islands, and distant stars and nebulae of space telescope quality, with evidence of human colonization in the Xen universe in the form of scientific bases along the way. These levels change my perspective on Valve's own Xen world. The old Borderworld was rather desolate and consisted of simple floating rocks, a few stations, pieces of Vortigaunt civilization here and there, and of course the grunt factory. I only just realized that the levels were short, and so the fun of exploring Xen ended all too soon. In Black Mesa, the Borderworld is an enormous oasis guaranteed to keep satisfying. I could go on about what I love about it, but to give a concise impression of the world, think of anything that has ever existed, or could ideally exist, from the bottom of the ocean, to a mineral-rich cave, to a jungle, all with a Half-Life spin. That's this world. I find it reminiscent of Star Wars. For one the buildings in the Vortigaunt village look like those on Tatooine, and for another the lushest areas look like the planets Dagobah and Kashyyyk. Another thing I notice is alien character development. Whereas players in 1998 were introduced to Vortigaunt slave life without much insight into how it worked, the characters in this remake are reintroduced with more clarity. The Vortigaunts are portrayed as humane, unlike their savage counterparts sent to Earth. They display a neutral and sometimes helpful affection towards Gordon throughout, only attacking when under the influence of an alien controller. They even have their own laboratory with artifacts collected from Black Mesa. When the action picks up, the levels almost look and play like a Doom reboot; simple but futuristic, fast, and explosive with much improved and better scripted boss fights. Apart from putting up with a crowd of Vortigaunts jibber-jabbering, which can become annoying, it is one of the rare moments where I think the fan recreation is actually better than the original developer's recreated, though to be fair, the fans were not subject to the same system and engine constraints as Valve in 1998. As a footnote, the old multiplayer deathmatch mode is still there, as are new maps for it, and sharing mods is made easier by Steam Workshop.

For all of its beauty and close attention to detail, Black Mesa seems to come at a cost of interactivity with the environment. The world seems to be more indestructible, as evidenced by the presence of fewer breakable objects mainly because objects like soda vending machines and trash bins can no longer be destroyed, enemy meat being harder to chop up into gibs, and even the absence of roaches to squash - things I liked about Half-Life but miss in this remake, along with instantaneous loading times and a few silly bugs, some of which occasionally crash the game. There is actually more interactivity overall, but there seems to be a higher ratio of things that cannot be used, broken, or moved. Another thing against this game is something that the small enthusiast team who tried (and largely succeeded) to right Valve's wrongs could not help, but is still relevant. The Source engine debuted in 2004, six years after the original Half-Life, and Black Mesa was finally fully released in 2020. By then, Source's success has been overshadowed by vastly technically superior games. To name just one of the many things exposing Source's decrepitude, the graphics and the resolutions of their textures are comparable to Half-Life 2, as opposed to a 2020 megahit, and my old GeForce GTX 1050 Ti can process all of the data at the highest settings quite well, never dropping below 30 frames. Even its gameplay is starting to resemble an early 2000s shooter. Sadly, switching to a modern engine like Source 2 and suitably redrawing the graphics and optimizing the code while still delivering the full game on time was impossible for a small group of fans who only built the game in their spare time. The project began in 2004, and Crowbar Interactive could not keep pace with the rapidly expanding technology. The result is what looks like a relic of the game's past self that aims to please modern audiences. The development of Black Mesa is an ugly allegory reminding us about the ever-increasing expenses of AAA game development that namely only corporations can afford.

VERDICT: Although Black Mesa relies on aged technology and does little to rejuvenate the gameplay beyond a simple nostalgia trip, it comes across feeling like a proper remake built using Valve's own standards thanks to the dedication, patience, and enthusiasm of Crowbar Interactive - something desperately missing in Half-Life: Source. In the end, I still prefer the old Half-Life, but, apart from the obvious, the Xen levels offer a real, meaningful reason anyone would ever prefer the remake. It was made by dissatisfied gamers for dissatisfied gamers, who can now rest happy that Half-Life has been given a modern overhaul.