![]() It's more like Gus Van Sant's shot-for-shot 1998 remake of Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho than the cleaned-up and "digitally remastered" release of Star Wars. It recreates the entirety of Half-Life in Half-Life 2's Source engine. But the scope of Black Mesa would have been an undertaking for any team. This is comparing apples and oranges a bit since there's a big difference between working in a well-funded, dedicated development team and a team of initially unpaid fans who are chipping away at a dream project while working day jobs. That's 16 years of development for a remake of a game that took only two years to develop. It's been in development in one form or another since shortly after the release of Half Life 2 in 2004. The new suddenly stands out like a sore thumb, forcing me to recognize the difference between Black Mesa's hobbyist origins and Half-Life's now canonical, genre-defining level design.īlack Mesa's frequent overextensions don't detract from it as one of the most ambitious mods in the history of video games. When it fails like this, Black Mesa brings the whole audacious experiment crashing down. But too often, like the battle at the missile silo, Black Mesa's additions bite off more than they can chew, adding too many enemies, new art assets, and dramatic music in an attempt to turn what was once a simple, memorable room or beat into an action set piece. New or overhauled spaces are woven seamlessly into the original, and capture its spirit of sci-fi, corporate dread so perfectly, I had to check videos of Half-Life on YouTube to check if they were actually new. Some of them are so subtle, they're hard to notice. In the original Half-Life, I could end this fight with one well placed grenade, but here, in the lovingly crafted fan-made remake called Black Mesa, it is a long and drawn-out fight, where I scramble from cover to cover, reload, and pick off not-so-clever enemies until the path is clear.īlack Mesa is full of these embellishments on the original Half-Life. What was once a simple rectangular space with a missile silo lid at its center is now a sprawling arena filled with boxes, military equipment, and soldiers running around shooting me. ![]() On March 9th, 2020, Crowbar Collective, the developers of the game, held an AMA session in /r/pcgaming subreddit, with the thread gaining over 4,200 upvotes and 730 comments.I turn the corner, as I have many times before, but I don't find what I expect. On Metacritic, the game maintained an 86 score with 14 critic reviews and 8.9 user score with over 720 ratings. On Steam, the game had a 95 percent approval rating with over 26,300 reviews as of March 10th, 2020. īlack Mesa received very positive reviews. On March 6th, 2020, the game was officially released for Microsoft Windows. On May 5th, 2015, the commercial build of the game, based on the 2013 version of the Source engine, entered early access on Steam. On November 19th, 2013, the Crowbar Collective announced that the game was approved by Valve to become a commercial product on Steam. At the same time, in September 2012, the project became one of the first ten games to be approved by Steam Greenlight. The version contained remakes of all Half-Life's chapters for the exception of the last chapter, set in the world of Xen. On September 14th, 2012, the first standalone version of Black Mesa, based on the 2007 version of the Source engine, was made available as a free download. The team later rebranded itself as the Crowbar Collective. After realizing that they had a common goal, the teams joined efforts, forming a 13-person team under the name Black Mesa: Source, with the name later changed to Black Mesa. In September and October 2004, following the release of Counter Strike: Source and the Source engine, Leakfree and Half-Life: Source Overhaul Project, two volunteer developer teams, launched projects to recreate 1998 critically acclaimed first-person shooter game Half-Life using the recently released Source engine. Originally developed as an independent mod based on the Source engine, the project was approved by Valve for commercial distribution and released on Steam in March 2020. Half-life, remake, black mesa, crowbar collective, valve, source engine, source overhaul project, leakfree, steam greenlightīlack Mesa is a 2020 first-person shooter video game that is a third-party remake of 1998 video game Half-Life.
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