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.
First of all- this mod is not perfect. I gave it a 10 to counter the shamefully low ratings a few people have given this mod. Black Mesa is pretty damn good though! I played HL1 on the PS2 port. Heard about Black Mesa sometime in 2006 after discovering Moddb- followed casually. I had a full review typed out with some detail but I lost all of it, so I'll make this brief.
The Good: the best production quality I've seen in a source mod. Black Mesa feels like a living, breathing location now. The levels are very faithful to the original intent, but with added inaccessible areas for needed depth to locations that felt cramped in HL1. Quality of level design, sound design and voice acting leaves me very impressed. Very fun to play overall, barring some game play issues details of which in negative section. Performance is consistently great all the way through, even in locations with much complex geometry. No major bugs I saw. Even though it took a very long time- it got RELEASED(at least MOST of it did)!
The Bad: Imbalanced soldiers- they are as accurate as Navy SEALs and shrug off bullets as if they were plastic BBs. Soldiers voices sound like a more macho and ridiculous David Hayter, total run-a-round to the original voices which sounded more believable. The music is pumped at 11 most of the time drowning out dialog and sound effects (fixed by setting the slider at 50%). Speaking of the music- I was hopping for an extended version of the BM Theme as it is too short and being the only demo/ost track I like.
The Ugly: Missing a couple levels from Surface Tension, but to be honest it wasn't a substantial loss. Missing Zen, and yes I know the designers have promised to release it later and they just wanted to go ahead and get the majority of the mod out. I'm just glad to get to finally play the mod at least in majority, so thus a "ugly".
Final say: it's a great mod with just a few flaws. I'd give Black Mesa a lowish nine out of ten.