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Black Mesa, a mod that was developed for the sole purpose of reworking the classic game “Half-Life”, is a free-to-download title that attempts to resurrect what made the game so great to begin with. It’s a risky feat that begs the question, ‘Why tamper with a classic when the original is still readily available?’. Does Black Mesa deliver a compelling argument
to this question or does it fall a little short?
Black Mesa tackles level-progression in a very different way
than most other first-person shooters or for the most part, games in general do. It teaches you by means of exploration and
use of your tools rather than by following the next objective marker on a mini-map. Black Mesa is all the more engaging for this. The world becomes more of a domain of
exploration and experimentation rather than a place that guides you by the nose out of fear you might get “stuck”. This
allows for the level designers to actually do their jobs in a ways that are
more interesting. Levels become more
like puzzles rather than simple environments that lead from one confrontation to
the next. The best part about this is
that these puzzles often don’t feel like traditional “puzzles”. You never stop to play meta-games like in Bioshock
or drag boxes around a clearly designed puzzle room like in Zelda. The designers made it so that the game feels
very much like you aren’t solving
puzzles but instead are overcoming basic obstacles that make sense in the game
world.
The AI on the other
hand, seems to lack much of the finesse of the level-design. The basic monster AI works fine for the most
part aside from the occasional 4 legged-creature running into a wall. The soldier AI is where the game
suffers. The soldier AI isn’t…horrible. But it can be extremely frustrating in ways
that don’t really make sense. For one, the soldiers will always rush you. This
can work to your advantage more often than it does to your disadvantage. Over and over again I found myself hiding
behind some sort of cover and just waiting until they came to me. It ends up taking a lot of the tactical
gameplay out of the experience and you often feel the need to do this because of the second problem the AI faces: their
perfect aim. If there is one thing that
drives me mad in FPS games, it’s when the AI has the ability to hit you with
Every. Single. Bullet. It’s
severely limits your tactics and makes things extremely difficult in a pretty
unintelligent way. A game of planning
and using the environment intelligently turns into finding a box and hiding
behind it for most firefights. It doesn’t
necessarily break the game but makes most encounters with soldiers very unenjoyable. If it wasn’t for my misplaced pride, I would’ve
switched the difficulty to easy after a couple hours into the game.
Somewhere nestled in-between the quality of the clever
level-design and the poor soldier AI, rests the game’s platforming
segments. Most of the time these are
very enjoyable and work in the game's favor unless you are horrible at crouch-jumping. But what really weighs against some of these
segments is the brutal difficulty. You
are expected to do a lot within a very strict control set. You character’s jumps are very short…almost
realistically short. This makes what you
have to accomplish all the more difficult.
Most of the time your jumps have to be absolutely perfect. Any less than that will have you dying
instantly and spawning back to where you last saved. Between the soldier battles and the
platforming, it will only be a matter of time until you are saving with OCD-like
tendencies.
If your saving in Black Mesa is OCD then the sound might be
considered to be a little Bi-Polar. Most
of the original game is left untouched.
No music. Just you and the environment.
Some might find this a little dull but it actually works in the
atmosphere’s favor in many situations.
The chatter of soldiers or the sound of a resting zombie is only intensified
by this. Some music has been added to
act as transitional pieces during pivotal moments in the game. I liked these pieces; most of the time they were
spot on and helped intensify the mood.
But they are incredibly jarring. By this I mean they are loud and add almost
too much intensity to the game. When one
of these pieces comes on it feels a little out of place even if they fit in
with the general feel of the game.
It’d be somewhat of a catastrophe if I didn’t
mention the visuals in Black Mesa. Considering that’s where most of the work
has clearly been done. What they’ve
achieved here is on nothing short of a professional level and breathes life
back into a dated game. The graphics in
the environments are somewhat of a mixed-bag though. One area may look gorgeous and rival current-gen
standards while a different environment might look a little worse than Half-Life 2. As an overall product
though it does what it set out to do and makes the game all the more enjoyable
for it.
Black Mesa is one of those rare games that could change your
perceptions of what a first-person shooter can be. It transcends much of what we are used to today, with shooters that focus on killing enemies rather than challenging the
player's intellect by engaging them in thought-provoking environments. In many ways the game emulates how learning
happens in the real world by challenging you to discover solutions rather than simply
handing them to you. While on the surface
Black Mesa may appear to be just a glorified graphical mod, it does much more
for the genre. Black Mesa helps reignite
the qualities of what made Half-Life such an important game in the first place.www.google.comhttp://www.google.com
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