I finished Black Mesa twice, once before xen, once after.
The positives:
- Swapping the 357 and Shotgun in Office Complex was clever, since it oneshots vorts with a well place eye-shot and is much more satisfying to use on them than the shotgun
- The general look and feel of the game is a lot nicer, areas feel lived in, some nonsensical areas were made to make sense. They nailed the tone and atmosphere
- Good music, and by using Source they have the ability to do things like tailor music to different actions, like how they play some music that remains quiet until you go through a vent, then the action kicks in.
- Voice acting sounds very faithful to the original characters
- Some of the updated writing and voice lines are really good and flesh out the world a bit. Things like the emergency broadcasts show the scale and scope of the invasion
- People can hate on it, I get that, but I really like the "no weapons" intro bit. Flares were extremely underutilised in the Episodes (only really being useful in Episode 1 for a single chapter), so seeing their gameplay expanded made me happy
- The HEV bootup sequence
The negatives:
- They completely butchered the weapon feel. It feels like a weird mishmash of Source and GoldSrc. Weapon handling feels clunky, like every action feels like it's just slightly too long. The worst offender is the SMG which does WAY too little damage and takes forever to kill anything. What was the workhorse of the original, a fast, agile weapon with very good damage is now a clunky feeling peashooter. I hate it.
- The movement feels a lot slower and less agile
- Enemies seem to be a lot more bullet spongey than in the original. Valve's design philosophy seems to have gone more towards "make enemies tankier" over time, and they have followed it. I remember the HECU in the original were pretty tough, but even they couldn't reliably survive a double shotgun blast to the face. The SMG also cut through them with relative easy. Now that the SMG is useless, fighting them is a total chore, especially since in chapters like We've Got Hostiles, the SMG is one of your only weapons at that point.
- On A Rail was gutted. It's a shame because the original was basically fine. I don't get where this idea of "original on a rail drags on" comes from. It's about the same length as any other chapter, it's definitely shorter than some of the later ones. If any chapter drags on in the original game, it's surface tension, but nobody notices because it's such an amazing experience, especially the first time through. On a Rail might seem boring at first, because it's just trains and hallways, but you have things like the spiral fight with the marines (when the train is going up on a spinning platform), train-to-train fights, a few turret ambushes, and of course the whole rocket section. It's a pretty decent chapter, all things considered, definitely not the worst part of the game (that goes to Residue Processing, which they didn't reduce at all and actually made worse in some ways. Typical)
- Surface tension seems particularly weirdly done. It's much more broken up than the original, with big empty areas that are unpopulated until you do some objective like pressing a button. The original was pretty much nonstop action from start to finish. I feel this damages the pacing of the section and makes it much more of a slog than an action fest.
- The AI for Marines seems to be significantly worse. I think it's just using basic Combine AI. Marines in the original would do things like drop grenades at their feet when damaged, they would have the basic ability to move around and flank, and you could sometimes listen to their radio chatter to hear things like "I'm hit" or "grenade out". all of that basically doesn't exist. They have a bunch of generic "we're gonna kill you, come out" style barks during combat (I'm surprised they don't say "never should have come here!" with how generic they are), and don't exhibit any of the more interesting HECU behaviour. Maybe I have just been unlucky, but I haven't seen them really do any new tricks either. They sort of just stand there and shoot, while advancing on you, similar to the Combine.
- Xen drags on WAY too long and the bosses are underwhelming. The factory was also the low point of the entire game for me, even worse than residue processing.
- Limited long-jump module timing is annoying. I also get triggered by using double-space rather than jump and crouch like the original, with no way to change it. When I complained about this on the forums, they told me it was "better", as if 20+ years of muscle memory don't matter. It almost makes me feel like they have contempt for the original jump module. I understand limiting spamming jumps for multiplayer, since that absolutely dominated the original deathmatch meta, but in singleplayer Xen it's just annoying and adds tedium to jumps.
Things I'm indifferent to:
- Addition of Sprint
- 357 Iron Sights
- Most of the structural changes that aren't outright bad. Some of the original levels had weird parts and mostly these are slightly better but sometimes worse
Overall, It's okay. Not amazing. I still prefer the original. I wouldn't say it's actively bad. If someone asks me if I recommend playing it I would say yes, but I don't agree with the general consensus among gamers (not this forum, the general gaming public) that it's a better, more advanced and up to date remake of the "crusty original". It certainly looks better and I could see why normies would prefer it to the (actually kind of nice looking) outdated graphics of the original. But in many ways it's inferior to the original and it seems they may not have fully understood exactly what made the original so memorable.
Yes, it's worth playing. I would say it's worth the $10 they want for it. That might seem odd given how negative I have been to it. But it's still fun, competently made, and mostly stands up on it's own as a fun shooter. It mainly suffers when you compare it to the original.
