![]() ![]() The sniper crossbow packs a similar weighty punch, but from much farther away. This hand cannon might be slow to fire and slower to reload its six-round capacity, but the thunderous sound it makes and the devastating impact on your target makes it more than worth all its limitations. 357 magnum – it’s easily one of the best game pistols of all time. But what really stands out for me is the loud and powerful. ![]() The crowbar is absurd in how quickly and manically Gordon can swing it to bludgeon enemies or shatter the wooden crates you’ll find everywhere, but it’s certainly useful in a pinch. At least, until you reach the alien homeworld of Xen, at which point it feels much more appropriate.Īnd the weapons? They’re still as good as ever.And the weapons? They’re still as good as ever. It’s not bad music, by any means, it simply strikes the wrong tone for Half-Life. One addition I’m not wild about is the original music, which chimes in to mark most occasions in which you achieve a major goal. It’s great to have real physics here as well – after Half-Life 2 it’s hard to imagine a Half-Life game without them – even though they’re very rarely used in puzzles or combat. It makes the sterile lab feel more like a real, lived-in (or at least worked-in) place. There are noticeably more NPC interactions that are generally well-acted and include in-jokes that reference the original dialogue, along with tons of environmental storytelling for you to stumble across, telling small stories of the last moments of the Black Mesa Research Facility’s less fortunate scientists and security guards. Welcome liberties are taken to cut out annoying segments of the original and add more of what works. This is an engine limitation the Black Mesa development team at Crowbar Collective likely had no way of working around, but it still makes it feel very old because you just don’t see that kind of thing anymore.Įven so, the atmosphere and action that made the original game so brilliant is brought out and highlighted even more in this version. Just like in 1998, they too frequently freeze the action as you’re walking down a hallway for around five seconds, even on an SSD. The most jarring thing, though, is the loading screens. Human character models and animations aren’t quite up to the standard Valve set with Half-Life 2 in 2004 (let alone the new bar about to be set in Half-Life: Alyx) and textures are pretty rough in a lot of places. but not as good as I willfully misremembered. Everything looks a lot better than it originally did, for sure. As someone who hasn’t replayed Half-Life since Valve ported it to the Source engine (without updating any of the models or textures) back in 2004, playing Black Mesa and fighting off a familiar interdimensional invasion was like putting on some smudged-up rose-colored glasses. ![]()
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