Run. Think. Shoot. Live. Source. Black Mesa is the Half-Life 2 total conversion of the original Half-Life game. Utilizing the Source engine and its endless array of possibilities and powers, Black Mesa will throw you into the world that started the Half-Life continuum and introduced Gordon Freeman to the world as a gun-toting, bullet-dodging Ph.D. in Theoretical Physics.
6/10 - Agree (3) Disagree (20)
A good if questionable experience. The mod has way too many difficulty spikes even on Easy. While more realistic, this still primarily plays like the original Half-Life, so there's parts where you'll be in the mindset of "I'm playing a game from 1997 remade to be all pretty and with a weapon that now has iron-sights!" or "I'm fighting for my life and the game thinks this is Demon Souls!"
Also, this is one of the few mods that has really shown me the Source engine's age. The animations can range between highly life-like to feeling so false they are immersion breaking.
So all in all, it wasn't an unpleasant experience, but eventually Half-Life's level design got annoying enough that I had to resort to No_Clip once again, just like in the original, when my patience was put to the limit. I navigated FEAR's maps and they all looked the same, and yet I had trouble here.
And a last minute suggestion to the devs: Let us skip the intro sequence if we want to get to the action. I actually set the game to windowed mode and got online with my D&D group while I waited for the gameplay to start. Yes it is significant and yes it is world building but if I want to skip it I should be damn well able to. There are times when we can't sit around for the intro drive or for Isaac to take nearly 2 minutes to swap between suits.