![]() The old Borderworld was rather desolate and consisted of simple floating rocks, a few stations, pieces of Vortigaunt civilization here and there, and of course the grunt factory. These levels change my perspective on Valve's own Xen world. Everything is rebuilt from the ground up, and the presentation is an absolute spectacle, surrounded by flora and fauna, many landscaped islands, and distant stars and nebulae of space telescope quality, with evidence of human colonization in the Xen universe in the form of scientific bases along the way. The moment Gordon breathes into the Borderworld, the player is in for a surprise. Were the Xen levels worth waiting 16 years for? The answer is definitely. Even a security guard says he will stay behind and not expose himself to sewage water laden with leeches, which apparently exist somewhere. I did not think they were detrimental to the game's quality. My only quibble is the absence of leeches, small creatures that dwell in the water along with the much larger ichthyosaur. The alien controllers, as first encountered when Gordon waits to jump into the portal to Xen in the Lambda Complex, make a shrilling sound that combined with their better clarified behavior is actually twice as terrifying, or at least the least bit so, compared to the original's screeches. As a disclaimer, I only tested the game on the Hard difficulty setting, the actual difficulty of which seems comparable to the original, if not a tad tougher, to the best of my memory. ![]() An HECU soldier's grenade can actually be picked up by the player and tossed back at him. It takes more than a little strafing to dodge its attacks, and if I am not mistaken, the player can even take damage from the acid splashing off nearby walls. The bullsquid, which used to spit acid in straight lines, now spits it spread out a little, the acid affected by gravity. On the behavior side, they are similarly comparable to the sequels, but some of their attacks are given an upgrade. Some of the assets, such as the headcrab and the barnacle, are directly ripped from the sequels. The enemies' behavior is more sophisticated and their design made to match the style of the sequel. Everything that made the original Half-Life great remains intact, only properly updated to take advantage of Source's capabilities, so I am getting to the point. There is not much else to say about the design changes, other than that there is more world scripting and interactivity and the characters are given more dialogue. Also noteworthy is the game's shift towards more roomy architecture, less so simple halls and tunnels, while still maintaining a linear gameplay. While on board a train car, everything is larger, upscaled, and better contoured, the tone of which is felt throughout, and up ahead await Half-Life 2-based physics and puzzles to exploit and solve. ![]() The moment the game is begun, the player knows what to expect from it. The remake starts off as in HL:S, with a splash screen, the in-game main menu background, and the familiar menus themselves, but with a difference: the splash screen is of Crowbar Interactive, the menu background is a level preview, and the menus' user interface is altered. Was the wait well worth it, or did Crowbar Interactive squander all those years in what could be the most spectacular disappointment in at least a decade of gaming? Black Mesa is an attempt to displace, or rather improve upon in its favor, Valve's own Source conversion. For a long time, only the climactic levels of the game, the Xen world, were left out as unfinished, but after sixteen years of development, they were finally added in 2020. However, it also inspired a team of upset fans to take their off time to embark on their own Source-based remake, built from the ground up and seeking to suture the communal rift Half-Life: Source created. It was essentially Valve's straight port of its 1998 classic to its newer Source engine, and, although it had some improvements such as level selection and water reflections, its critics saw it as a non-worthy upgrade that only served to divide the Half-Life community. That game was Half-Life: Source, from the same year. It was powered by the Source engine, whose might it could communicate better than any other title before or since, although it was not the first game to run on it. A sequel was released, and for the same reasons it is also considered one of the greatest games. It has since been called one of the greatest games, as it was an FPS whose story was actually narrated like a novel (for once, the press rejoiced), and was also known for the sheer beauty of the graphics, its ability to maintain a tense mood throughout, and supplanting the basic framework Quake laid for shooters to follow for years to come. In 1998, Sierra On-Line published Half-Life, a sci-fi thriller first-person shooter by Valve.
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