Reviews - Quinn-G

This mod has come and gone over the years, thought to be dead for some time, then resurfaced, then dead again... Thankfully, the wait has been well worth it (even though it still lacks the Xen levels), and now that I've crowbar'd and shot my way to the teleporter in the Lambda Core, I'm happy to finally review it.

Where to begin? I believe the overhauled map design is the mod's strongest point. The maps gave a sense of thrilling nostalgia along with a new, more realistic perspective, and not just because of the Source engine. The skillful lighting, added to the stellar quality of the ambience sounds, gave Black Mesa the depth it kind of lacked in the original game.

The gameplay has also been given a complete refit - and by that, I mean both by HL1 and HL2 standards. In both games, you could just run around guns blazing and take hits without considerable damage, but this mod actually forces you -in a good way- to stick to your cover when fighting a certain number of enemies or just really tough ones like a helicopter or a tank. Others may not like it, but they can always go back to Call Of Duty for all I care.

But this is only the 1.0 version of the mod, and it didn't come without a few hiccups. The consoles in the laser chamber on chapter "Questionable Ethics" would become invisible after I activated the first laser, and at the beginning of chapter "On A Rail", the mod would awkwardly slow down, forcing me to open up the console (a shame for a mod this good) and type in host_timescale 1.7. Issues I hope will be dealt with in a future patch.

Regardless of these bugs, the mod did a perfect job of porting the atmosphere of the Black Mesa Research Facility to the Source engine, and MY GOD. There's no amount of nerdgasm to express how much I loved the Kleiner and Eli -maybe even Lamarr?- cameo. This first version gave me everything I hoped for and more, and I look forward to kicking Nihilanth's giant butt in the glory of the Source engine in the completed mod.