Quite an impressive milestone for an incredible game overall! The Half-Life remake Black Mesa has managed to cross over 100,000 user reviews on Steam. It's rated Overwhelmingly Positive thanks to everyone leaving their thoughts. And going by the Steam Top 250 list it's currently number 155 of the most highly rated games on Steam ever.
Not exactly surprising though, given how loved Half-Life is and Black Mesa is a pretty incredible remake all-around with some fantastic attention to detail.
Black Mesa is rated Steam Deck Playable, and it has a Native Linux version - but you're better off using Proton as it's been left with numerous bugs.
Would you say people first starting off in Half-Life should jump into Black Mesa? Or are you a die-hard for the actual original which recently had its own big 25th Anniversary Update? I'm still amazed Valve actually allowed Crowbar Collective to do a remake like this.
Find Black Mesa on Steam.
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
Last edited by TimeFreeze on 7 February 2024 at 3:12 pm UTC
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.
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.
release hit Steam - but with filtering off.
Definite version for me.
I still have conflicted feelings if I should try it again. Maybe when it's ready?
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