Black Mesa
Playtime: 14.9 Hours
Finished 19 December 2025.Played on Hard mode. Second full playthrough, after playing it previously in 2021; there have been some updates since then so I figured I'd play through it again.
This game is as good as I remembered it, a fantastic modern remake of the original Half-Life, which I always personally preferred over HL2 and the episodes. Mechanics are classic Source; movement is tight, air acceleration and bhop make for very fluid controls. I'm really glad that this game properly supports at least basic bhopping, since it's really fun to bounce around all the levels and just makes the game feel more mechanically "deep", even if it isn't necessarily the case. There's a bit of an exception for the long jump - there seems to be a weird activation delay (scroll wheel jumping won't set it off sometimes but it's super inconsistent), and the controls for it just feel a bit clunky to me, for lack of any more precise complaints. Plus, it gets rid of my ability to bhop normally!
Weapons and enemies are more or less consistent with the original game; some minor behaviors are enhanced (ex. Vortigaunts dodging) and the HECU are insane aimbots in this game, but nothing too unreasonable. Weapons feel much better, though - they absolutely nailed their design, and every one of them feels powerful and useful at various points throughout the game. Outside of the snarks, alien blaster, and the seldom-useful trip mines, I'm pretty sure I regularly rotated between every weapon I had, which really highlights not only the strength but also the diversity of Gordon's arsenal.
My main gripes are focused on just a few levels in the game. I did feel like the length of Surface Tension did eventually get a bit stale, particularly given that the entire chapter is spent fighting cracked-out HECU marines which are really tough to fight. I really wasn't a fan of the helicopter boss either. But the Xen chapters sit in a much stranger place for me; I can't deny that they look fantastic, and stand near the apex of environmental aesthetics in games (truly!), but the level design starts to slip a little bit here. Given the rush job of the original Xen chapters, Crowbar Collective were able to interpret these areas a bit more freely, but this freedom also meant that most of the truly "new" areas in Black Mesa are stuffed within these last few chapters.
The result was that the last few chapters (Xen, Gonarch's Lair, Interloper) all tend to drag on for quite a bit too long. What was originally the climax of HL1 is turned into an entire third act, and the fact that several monotonous puzzle types are repeated too many times just makes it feel a bit tacked on; this was worse in Interloper than in Xen, but both could have been about 25% shorter at least. Gonarch's Lair was also expanded into a full chapter as well, focused more on gimmicky chases and weird/annoying puzzles that felt strangely paced, given that the actual Gonarch fight phases are separated by ~30 minutes of mindlessly running around. The Gonarch itself is a pretty fun fight, but I wish the entire thing happened all at once. Thankfully, nothing of that sort happens to Nihilanth; that's just a straightforward boss fight. The mechanics of Black Mesa's updated Nihilanth fight are far better than the weird teleport shenanigans in OG HL1, so I don't have any major complaints there.
In general, the impression I had of this game hasn't really changed much since the last time I played it; if anything, the exaggerated memories I had about the length of the Xen segment actually made the game better this time around since I knew what to expect there. By all accounts, even with my nitpicks above, it's absolutely phenomenal and I'll most likely come back for another go before too long. It also helps that similar remakes for Blue Shift and (maybe) Opposing Force are also on their way.
