Half-Life remake Black Mesa hits over 100,000 Steam reviews to Overwhelmingly Positive

a deserved success

I have mixed feelings about Black Mesa. Visually it's fantastic, and it's great to replay Half-Life with a more modern look. But as the game goes on, they diverged more and more from the original. Zen is huge in Black Mesa, and while it *looks* great, it's so formulaic (combat, platform, puzzle, repeat) that it feels more like a drag. Half-way through Zen, I felt like I'm just pushing forward just to say I finished the game.

There was something about Half-Life that made it a great game, the new Zen doesn't have that something.


Last edited by ShabbyX on 7 February 2024 at 10:22 pm UTC

Anyone here playing/having played it on the Deck? How do you configure controls? I installed it about a year ago and couldn't find a way to configure controls that feels comfortable to me.

Personally i dislike Black Mesa. Its just not for me, i'll stay with the Original.


Last edited by TimeFreeze on 7 February 2024 at 3:12 pm UTC

Played through Black Mesa about two years ago. Yes, the Linux build for those that are convinced that it doesn't work. It's not super stable. Some crashes related to the physics system while jumping into the portal to Xen that apparently happens on Windows as well.

As for the game itself, I'm mixed on it as well. Some of the changes are good, but others not so much. I'm especially mixed about Xen. It looks amazing and it's nice that it made more of an effort than the original did. However, it is tedious and making an enemy invulnerable based on where it is is just not a half-life way of doing things. The game would have been better if the whole chase stuff wasn't there and if the rest of Xen was a bit shorter.

The game still has some bugs that should be fixed, and Steam Deck support would be appreciated from them.

Always appreciated what Black Mesa did. I mean I never got to play Half Life 1 when it was in its prime, I had an N64 and a barely usable prebuilt HP running Windows ME when it came out. By the time Half Life was on my radar it was a hard game to get into. I prefer the original nowadays, but without Black Mesa to show me the design and artistic intent behind those dated graphics and mildly jank mechanics... I'm not sure if I'd ever have beaten HL1 and be quite as big of a Half Life fan as I am now.
Actually, nevermind, Fallout 1 & 2 never got remakes and I managed to power through their jank and become a toxic Fallout fan, and those games are intensely more dated. If Black Mesa got delayed even longer I probably would a got tired of waiting and just powered through HL1 and be just as much of a fan as I am now. In any case, Black Mesa was cool and Mark Laidlaw is a good writer and aside from his work on Half-Life I really liked his book Dad's Nuke.

Recently did the umpteenth replay when the 25th anniversary
release hit Steam - but with filtering off.
Definite version for me.

I never was a huge Half-Life fan .. and I played through both and have to say - I didn't really enjoy either. Guess it's just not a game for me.

I tried to play Black Mesa couple of years ago and it just kept on crashing. I posted a negative review because of that (to help others on Linux to decide) and people just kept on saying that I should uninstall Linux and use Windows instead. After that I just lost interest to the game.

I still have conflicted feelings if I should try it again. Maybe when it's ready?