Mad Max RW
Mildly Dipped
Beat it in about 4 hours. The level layout is nearly identical to the original, so there weren't many surprises. If you played Half Life as many times as I have you'd be able to clear it without much thought.
It's done well, though. Tons of detail. Monsters are pushovers. At some places the zombies are more numerous and the final area where you defend the teleporter has more things spawning on the ground. Soldiers are tough. Jumping is nerfed for whatever reason. Graphics are great for 2005. Although the human models and especially their faces are very impressive. Security guards seem to have ten times as much health, which is weird. The new female assassins are cool.
Music is very good. Sound effects range from great (ambient sounds) to really horrible (certain monsters and weapons are weak). Voice acting is mostly good. Young Kleiner is great and the female announcer fits perfectly. Other voices are dog shit. Young Eli Vance is the worst part of the game and the soldiers sound like douchebags.
There's quite a few technical glitches, and a few game breaking. The minor stuff has to do with scripted animations breaking or skipping. Like I said before the jumping is really screwed up and feels all wrong. Friendly NPC's like scientists and security guards will often explode if they walk over objects like broken boxes or whatever. This might prevent a switch from doing its thing or a certain glass from breaking a minute later and you have to reload often. I had a few random crashes with a nonsense bug report.
Black Mesa is a good intro to Half Life and its sequel. However, it's definitely not a complete game and this becomes all the more apparent when it ends right when you are supposed to enter Xen and the final chapters. Over the years the common consensus online seems to be Xen was Half Life's weakest part. Black Mesa promised to fix this. Well, they didn't. They did a damn good job prettying up the best part of the game, but didn't reach the long promised goal of a fully updated Half Life experience. You can sort of understand why it took 8 years while playing. They held back and took the easy way out copying too much. Perhaps entire chapters were remade dozens of times until they settled on what's been done before. A few points it's a borderline survival-horror and gets interesting. But the originality is fleeting at best.
My final recommendation: check it out then replay the original.
It's done well, though. Tons of detail. Monsters are pushovers. At some places the zombies are more numerous and the final area where you defend the teleporter has more things spawning on the ground. Soldiers are tough. Jumping is nerfed for whatever reason. Graphics are great for 2005. Although the human models and especially their faces are very impressive. Security guards seem to have ten times as much health, which is weird. The new female assassins are cool.
Music is very good. Sound effects range from great (ambient sounds) to really horrible (certain monsters and weapons are weak). Voice acting is mostly good. Young Kleiner is great and the female announcer fits perfectly. Other voices are dog shit. Young Eli Vance is the worst part of the game and the soldiers sound like douchebags.
There's quite a few technical glitches, and a few game breaking. The minor stuff has to do with scripted animations breaking or skipping. Like I said before the jumping is really screwed up and feels all wrong. Friendly NPC's like scientists and security guards will often explode if they walk over objects like broken boxes or whatever. This might prevent a switch from doing its thing or a certain glass from breaking a minute later and you have to reload often. I had a few random crashes with a nonsense bug report.
Black Mesa is a good intro to Half Life and its sequel. However, it's definitely not a complete game and this becomes all the more apparent when it ends right when you are supposed to enter Xen and the final chapters. Over the years the common consensus online seems to be Xen was Half Life's weakest part. Black Mesa promised to fix this. Well, they didn't. They did a damn good job prettying up the best part of the game, but didn't reach the long promised goal of a fully updated Half Life experience. You can sort of understand why it took 8 years while playing. They held back and took the easy way out copying too much. Perhaps entire chapters were remade dozens of times until they settled on what's been done before. A few points it's a borderline survival-horror and gets interesting. But the originality is fleeting at best.
My final recommendation: check it out then replay the original.
