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So, I played... Black Mesa

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Oh boy, this review has been in the works for ages now but I decided that it’s better late than never and I’ve finally compiled my thoughts on Black Mesa, the fan remake of Half-Life. So, let’s check it out!

Black Mesa is a commercial fan remake of Half-Life and is developed by Crowbar Collective, a company that was formed around the Black Mesa project. Black Mesa follows the very same events as Half-Life and puts you in the role of Gordon Freeman during a catastrophe caused by a science experiment gone wrong. The Black Mesa research facility is being overrun by inter-dimensional aliens and the US military is about to “correct” the situation. You, naturally, are caught in the crossfire.

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As you might expect, the main focus of Black Mesa is to bring the Half-Life story to the modern age with numerous graphical improvements. The texture work, models and audio have all been improved upon greatly and the game uses a newer version of the Source engine along with its lighting capabilities, giving the game a modern look. I would say Black Mesa’s graphical side is the best fan work I’ve seen thus far and definitely gives the research facility and its surrounding areas a lot more life.

But don’t think for a second that Black Mesa is just some high-detail texture pack on top of Half-Life. While the story of Half-Life is quite carefully replicated by Black Mesa, some aspects have been changed quite a bit from the original. The levels have been redone with a lot more detail and sometimes have been adjusted in subtle ways that make the environments look and work better than the fairly empty hallways and corridors of the original while still staying fairly recognizable to those who have played the original. If you played Half-Life you can quite easily find your way but sometimes you might notice the paths aren’t exactly the same as in the original. And despite some changes to the layout of the levels, as far as I know, nothing has been left out. Even the fairly annoying first-person platforming parts are still in the game. Luckily the crouch-jump has been faded out.

Some new environmental puzzles were also added to the game. Since Black Mesa uses the Source engine, the developers also have the physics system at their disposal and they seem to have taken advantage of it for some of their puzzles, which are Half-Life 2 style in nature but aren’t nearly as excessive as with Half-Life 2. In my opinion, a simple physics puzzle here and there only balances the various gunfights and they are never too difficult as to stop you from making progress.

In terms of combat, Black Mesa is pretty close to the original. While the guns sound and look more awesome than in the original, the damage they do seems to be have remained more or less same. This means that sometimes enemies feel a bit spongy and often take half a magazine to kill with an assault rifle. I personally would have appreciated enemies that deal high damage but also die fairly easily but the combat was still enjoyable. The enemies have also gotten some updates, particularly the more alien creatures. In the original the alien creatures were fairly weak, as they were used in the early parts of the game. In Black Mesa they have been buffed and pose a bigger threat than before or at least more of an annoyance than before. The human enemies haven’t been changed that much but they seem maybe a little bit more tactical than before. But overall the soldiers you end up fighting behave fairly similarly to those of the original game: they take cover behind objects, try to flush you out with grenades and run at you with shotguns and assault rifles if given the opportunity.

While the gameplay and graphical side of the game are quite awesome, some technical aspects weigh the overall experience down a bit. Considering the graphical improvements, it’s no surprise that the hardware requirements have risen quite a bit. If you have a fairly modern discrete GPU you should be fine but on integrated graphics you might need to turn down the settings to medium-low to get a playable experience. I tried the game on my A10-9600p APU and the game worked but was a bit too much to be run at 1080p High settings. So I opted for a 900p experience at medium which seemed to be enough to keep the framerates within the range of playability. However, the framerate of Black Mesa is pretty inconsistent and even my desktop which is rocking an R7 370 and a Ryzen 7 1700 (earlier i5-2500k) does not keep the framerate above 60 all of the time. While the game might run well over 100 FPS most of the time, some areas will cause the game to drop down to 30-40 FPS. I’m fairly sure I’m running into some kind of a CPU bottleneck in those certain areas since upgrading to the Ryzen seems to have improved those areas a little bit but it’s still fairly unclear to me why those areas cause my computer to struggle. Typically there wasn’t anything obviously intensive happening that could cause the framerate to plummet like that. In addition to this, there are some graphical glitches that range from minor to annoying. Sometimes the shadows look broken and at high shadow detail the helmets the human soldiers wear will change colours in strange ways.

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Of course some or all of these problems could be tied to the open source drivers I’m using but since no other Source game seems to have these kinds of issues, my guess is that some shaders used in the game are a bit wonky. Luckily the helmet bug can be avoided by turning shadow detail to medium.

The game also seems to suffer from some instability issues. During my playthrough I encountered one area with a reproducible, game breaking crash that simply stopped me from continuing. Luckily there was a fix for this published as a beta which allowed me to get through the rest of the game. Other people on the Steam forums seem to have been running into way more crashes than I have, however, so it’s possible that I was lucky during my playthrough.

Another thing worth noting is that running the game from a slow hard drive can be a little bit annoying. The levels contain quite a few assets and the levels are sometimes quite big which definitely require longer load times than, say, the original game. I decided, in my unlimited wisdom, to install the game on an old Samsung 5400 RPM hard drive and got to suffer from numerous annoyingly long loading screens. Of course this is partially a fault of my hardware decisions but it’s still worth keeping in mind if you are still rocking a slow HDD.

Overall I’m quite impressed by Black Mesa. It does exactly what a remake is supposed to: improve upon the aspects that haven’t aged well without compromising on the aspects that gave the original game its personality. If you ask me, Black Mesa is a better product than Half-Life which is exactly how it should be. However, Black Mesa still has some things it needs to improve upon. The final part of the game, Xen, hasn’t been implemented yet and there are some technical issues that hurt the overall experience. But despite these shortcomings, Black Mesa offers a decent gaming experience that lasts around 10-12 hours and considering how much fun I had with it, I’d say it’s worth the asking price of 20€.

Steam: http://store.steampowered.com/app/362890/ Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Tags: Action, FPS, Review, Steam
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About the author -
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I'm a Linux gamer from Finland. I like reading, long walks on the beach, dying repeatedly in roguelikes and ripping and tearing in FPS games. I also sometimes write code and sometimes that includes hobbyist game development.
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19 comments
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Grimfist Mar 14, 2017
I have bought the game as they released the Linux beta to support the development. Samsai put it completly right, they improved the "bad" things of the original while still keeping its personality. It feels like HL1 through and through. I still encounter a reproducable shader error in the Surface Tension level which keeps me from going on in the game. But I haven't played since the last update, so that maybe fixed in the meantime.
I will start a fresh run in the next weeks. Oh, and we want to see Liam stream this too, for shits and giggles :D
Guppy Mar 14, 2017
The "strange" helmet helmet colour looks very much like they are accidentally using the normal map as a texture
MayeulC Mar 14, 2017
I personally prefer to use the magnum to deal with the black ops. One bullet, hitscan (infinite bullet speed for this weapon) as far as I know. It's one of my favorite weapons, actually. You just have to keep some ammunition.

I did encounter those issues as well, I am a bit disappointed that they aren't fixed yet. Especially the crash near the dropship. I guess they are focused on Zen right now (lat time I heard about this, they were planning for a summer release). The one that was pretty annoying and that they fixed was the movement code, though. I was always getting stuck in the pipes, and had to resort to noclip on several occasions.
Did they fix the vortigaunts' aiming? They couldn't hit you reliably 3 meters from them, standing in a corridor, making them ridiculously less dangerous, last time I played. And, by the way, they are by far the most dangerous enemies of the original game, in my opinion, if only because of the damage they deal.


I really enjoy the remake. I've been following its progress since 2 years before it was out, and played it day one on its original release (non-steam, but I still have screenshots in my steam library). I'm still a bit disappointed some features didn't make it, such as randomized NPC models. Didn't see any "WD-43" sprays as well in this release :P (but we have a Tux mug!)

The game can be a bit hard at times, especially the sequences with a lot of marines. I finished the game on hard, and I agree, the enemies can be a bit too much on the bullet-sponge side, especially the marines and the helicopters. (Thankfully, it looks like they put a lot more tau/gluon ammunition than in the original game).

The multiplayer is pretty fun as well, with some classic maps such as crossfire. But the experience still seems a bit light at the moment; I guess they are still concentrating on Xen. I wonder what will come next, once they are done, though. Cooperation? They abandoned the idea some time ago, but could pick it up again. They also stated that they were not interested in the Gearbox extensions (blueshift and opposing force), but another modding team is working on it, IIRC.
rea987 Mar 14, 2017
Quoting: Mountain ManDo you have snarks by that point in the hands game? I can't remember.

Me neither. During my initial playthrough, I killed them with grenade launcher; that was the most solid way to stop them. Following playthroughs, I simply cheated, spawned the weapons I like and let snarks to eat them... :P
MayeulC Mar 14, 2017
To answer my own question, it seems from your video that vortigaunts still have trouble aiming properly :P

That makes the game *a lot* easier.
Solitary Mar 14, 2017
Quoting: rea987
Quoting: Mountain ManDo you have snarks by that point in the hands game? I can't remember.

Me neither. During my initial playthrough, I killed them with grenade launcher; that was the most solid way to stop them. Following playthroughs, I simply cheated, spawned the weapons I like and let snarks to eat them... :P

I am somewhat confident that you do not have Snarks during first encounter with BlackOps.
rea987 Mar 14, 2017
Quoting: SolitaryI am somewhat confident that you do not have Snarks during first encounter with BlackOps.

As I have pointed out I have cheated to let snarks eat them. But, if I am not mistaken there was a some sort of storage section that player encounters Black Ops just before Lambda Core; it should be bm_c3a2a of Lambda Core. That's a pretty late game that player should be holding almost whole arsenal.


Last edited by rea987 on 14 March 2017 at 10:23 pm UTC
Solitary Mar 14, 2017
Quoting: rea987
Quoting: SolitaryI am somewhat confident that you do not have Snarks during first encounter with BlackOps.

As I have pointed out I have cheated to let snarks eat them. But, if I am not mistaken there was a some sort of storage section that player encounters Black Ops just before Lambda Core; it should be bm_c3a2a of Lambda Core. That's a pretty late game that player should be holding almost whole arsenal.

Yes, you are correct. Second encounter is in the warehouse before Lambda Core and you have basically entire arsenal with the exception of gluon gun, which you actually acquire very soon after.
jd117 Mar 16, 2017
dont worry liam :D i have yet to play half life 2... silly work, bills and star conflict* dont give me time to play

*loaded with balance issues, f2p, p2w, and old.. but still pretty much one of the few 3d space mmo shooters out there
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