Valve brengt ter ere van 25e verjaardag Half-Life grote update uit

Ahh, Black mesa.... If I could give a 'meh' instead of a thumbs up or down I would probably do that.
I liked the first half of the game, which is basically Halflife with improvements. It looks a lot better than the original and although it has been a long time that I played the original, I think it probably plays a bit better too. But, it's still painfully obvious that at heart this is a really old game. Yes Halflife was brilliant for its time, but we are decades further now. I don't think I would recommend this game to anyone that has not already played the original, or is otherwise into older games.

Where I really soured on Black Mesa is... Xen... As most will know, Xen was already considered the worst part of Halflife, but it did have one thing going for it. It was short, you could get through it pretty fast. In Black Mesa Xen has been completely redone. Graphically it is awesome and in principle I like the far jump mechanic that they added. However that same mechanic also shows that this was clearly not made by Valve, it doesn't have the same level of polish and can be quite janky. I also feel like Xen is a completely different game from what you played up to that point. It's almost all exploration, with some unchallenging monsters thrown in that are really just annoying (making you reload because you didn't have the shotgun in your hands when a pack of those round things run up to you, or you didn't see the pack of acid spitting enemies)... no challenge, just annoying, in very stark contrast to the heavy marine combat that you had a lot of right before going to Xen. The exploration could have been nice, but it feels like you're just doing the same kind of 'puzzle' over and over. I got bored out of my mind and just left the game at some point, hours into just walking and walking and jumping and walking some more... They should probably have cut at least half of it out again, now it just feels like padding to inflate the playtime and I don't appreciate it.

All in all, it pains me to give a thumbs down, but considering how highly it's rated I feel like I should vote down to level it out a bit. I really feel it's heavily overrated.