YMMV / Black Mesa

• Anti-Climax Boss: Zigzagged with Nihilanth. He takes a more direct approach to fight you, not bothering to teleport you periodically as you weaken him. Instead, you're meant to break his shield generators (foreshadowed by a similar puzzle regarding some Alien Controllers), then shatter his second shield with direct damage and damage him once there are enough holes in it. Alongside dodging his more lethal attacks and shattering the yellow crystals like in the original game, you attack his exposed cranium from the ground once he's weak enough. There's no need to use the launch pads to gain enough height to get a shot at his brain. The supplies that would have been provided from the teleportation sequences are instead teleported into the arena itself as the Nihilanth attempts to summon debris to throw at you in fits of rage. To make a long story short, this fight isn't padded out like in the original, and it feels a bit easier than the elevator fight that takes place before this chapter. Nonetheless, the presentation is still top-notch.
• Arc Fatigue: While the revamp of the Xen levels has been met with overall critical acclaim, some get bored of it by "Interloper" due to it being That One Level. Particularly, the length and difficulty that it takes to get through the extended Alien Grunt factory.
• Awesome Boss:
  • The Gonarch is no longer a mere "Get Back Here!" Boss as in the original Half-Life, but rather a much more credible and active antagonist throughout "Gonarch's Lair", with two suitably intense and challenging all-out combat encounters at the mid-point and climax of the level.
  • In spite of the Anti-Climax Boss entry above, Nihilanth's direct, mano-a-mano approach to fighting Gordon is a huge spectacle. With Nihilanth no longer cowering behind a series of teleportation attacks to get Gordon away from him, he instead now resorts to throwing gigantic piles of debris his way, some of it teleported directly from Earth! But luck is on Gordon's side; his friends on the other side still manage to teleport vital supplies his way, feeding him the ammunition he needs to break through Nihilanth's shields and end him once and for all. What was once a long, laborious, somewhat cryptic puzzle is now a proper boss fight, with only the mightiest becoming the true winner in the end, and Gordon Freeman's victory is made all the more significant with this overhaul.
• Awesome Music: Courtesy of Joel Nielsen.
  • Special mention goes to Questionable Ethics 1, the song that plays during the lobby fight at the end of the eponymous level. Makes the moment feel a lot more badass.
  • Black Mesa Theme beautifully conveys the tragedy of what happens at Black Mesa. Words alone cannot do it justice.
  • Its updated release, Resonance that plays in the aftermath of the resonance cascade sells the horror of what has happened as you awake in the ruins of the Anti-Mass Spectrometer. In a few short seconds, what was a normal day turned into a living nightmare.
  • All three parts of Inbound do a great job of setting the mood of what's to come.
  • The topside battle theme for "Forget About Freeman!". The heart-pounding rush the song delivers, accompanied by the Marines making a last attempt to kill Freeman, the dogfights between the Manta Rays and Jets, and the player's last sight of the Earth's surface makes for an incredibly well-done scene.
  • The absolutely epic song that plays during Blast Pit once you return from turning on the power and fuel, which pumps you up to kill that tentacle monster once and for all. It has caused many a player to throw caution to the wind and run right past the monster to activate the rocket.
  • The fearfully tense piano track that plays while navigating the tripmine maze takes a situation that already has the player on edge and turns the anxiety up to eleven.
  • The Xen soundtrack piece Shadows of Death (V2) is the perfect background music for the terrifying chase sequence in Interloper. The previous tracks perfectly encapsulate the otherworldly beauty of Xen, but this one with its prolonged One-Woman Wail mixed with heart-pumping drumming and electronic music truly encapsulates Xen's status as a Death World as you are pursued by not one, not two, but no less than an entire pack of the nigh-invulnerable Gargantuas, unable to do anything but run as fast as you can through the mazelike environment of Xen and pray that you don't get cornered by them or ran down the wrong way.
  YouTube Comment: All of Xen was of one thought. And that thought was DEATH.
  • Ascension and its reprise, presented here as an in-game mix as heard during the final part of Interloper. The most badass elevator music ever put in a game, though it is to be expected when you're also fighting a whole bunch of Alien Controllers on the way to Nihilanth. Sells the fact that Gordon has fought his way through near-literal Hell.
• Breather Level: The Borderworld's introductory chapter, Xen, is largely more focused on puzzle-solving and platforming than the previous combat-focused Earthbound chapters. While there are still enemies and hazards present, they are largely on the level of Zombies, Bullsquids, and Houndeyes as opposed to the Vortigaunts, Alien Grunts, and Alien Controllers that the player just fought after the previous chapter, Lambda Core. And it comes before the Gonarch fight and the absolutely brutal Interloper chapter.
• Broken Base: There was some controversy over Crowbar Collective's decision to cut the M4A1 and M9 skins from the game. These weapons were reskins of the MP5 and Glock, respectively, in the original game's "HD Pack" add-on, and were initially planned to be added as a toggle-able option before being cut altogether. Some fans of the HD Pack were quite put off by this, though others didn't mind, either because they don't care about weapon models or because they know they can use a Game Mod to add them.
• Catharsis Factor:
  • In "Interloper", Alien Controllers forcibly mind-control Vortigaunts to make them hostile towards Gordon Freeman. Compared to the original game, this makes it feel so much more rewarding to kill the Alien Controllers while keeping the Vortigaunts alive.
  • The last third of the chapter "Interloper" is filled with green crystals that constantly restock your Depleted Uranium reserves turning the Tau Cannon and Gluon Gun from Too Awesome to Use weapons into guns that you're fully encouraged to use as much as you can. Combine this with a bunch of Alien Controllers to fight, and you're in for a cathartic experience.
  • Killing the Nihilanth counts, considering his enslavement and horrible treatment of the Vortigaunts (which is shown in-game, rather than just mentioned in the backstory like in the original game).
• Creepy Cute: With better rendering and visual effects, some of the Xen enemies and wildlife come off as cute despite their alien appearance and deadliness.
  • Houndeyes can come off like this in Black Mesa; you can run into several packs who are lying on the ground, napping and snuggling without a care for the strange world they now found themselves in. You can sneak past them without disturbing and instigating a fight - or just blow them all up with a satchel charge or grenade with their guard down.
  • Snarks can writh rather cutely when you hold them in your hands. They become less cute once they are unleashed on your enemies or you.
• Demonic Spiders:
  • The Marines are a nightmare to fight. They're very tough, headshots are difficult to pull off, they happen to be very accurate, carry automatic weapons, and there are hospital corpsmen in every squad. Commanders and Shotgun Soldiers are even worse, with the former having more health and can use their weapon's grenade launcher, and the latter carrying powerful shotguns that can reduce a full health and armor bar to nothing in a few shots. Also, have fun trying to follow the usual video game logic and setting up a choke point where you can cut them down as soon as they step into your sights, only to lose the ensuing waiting game. Soldiers won't blindly rush forward into an area where they've lost men, preferring instead to set up defensible positions and wait for you to pop out. Similarly, they'll take cover to reload and advance if you stop to do the same. The commercial version has balanced it out a bit by making them somewhat less accurate and slightly increasing their reaction time.
  • The Houndeyes went from being somewhat weak in the original to being quite dangerous in Black Mesa, to the frustration of some players. They attack very quickly, are difficult to escape from, come at you in packs and mess with your screen/audio. This isn't even getting to the sub-species you encounter in Xen, which include smaller, glowing pups that explode upon death, and the large, crystal-encrusted bulls that have the propensity to ram you like an enraged cattle beast. Making matters worse is that both variants are commonly encountered alongside precarious walkways and paths, meaning it's likely for either one of them to send you careening down into the abyss below.
  • The Alien Grunts. In addition to looking less cartoonish and more menacing, they are even more dangerous than in the original game. Their Hivehands have better tracking, do a lot of damage, and even cause knockback which makes taking them out with mounted guns less feasible. They'll also use more brute force on you when you're within melee range and will rush you with a new ramming attack if you're not careful. Also, they use squad tactics, so facing them in groups can turn the battle into a nightmare very quickly.
  • Hoo boy, the Alien Controllers put the Marines from the mod version to shame. In addition to moving very quickly and firing their projectiles non-stop, they are also capable of turning the otherwise docile Vortigaunt Slaves in the Xen chapters hostile, and can toss explosive barrels at you with telekinetic powers.
  • Even nerfed considerably in the retail version, the Black-Ops Assassins remain ludicrously lethal, in particular the second time you meet them in Lambda Core. Have fun taking on 4-5 small, unerringly accurate acrobats that you can barely see in a cramped, dark freight hangar. There is no escaping them, and they will not be led backwards into an area better suited to you.
• Ending Fatigue: Arguably even worse than the original. While Xen is much more pleasant to look at this time around, it drags on for far longer^note During development, the Crowbar Collective advertised Xen as being long enough to be its own full-length game while still leaving the player essentially completely alone. Not helping matters is that most of the puzzles and set pieces in Xen are created from whole cloth, meaning players can't fall back on the knowledge of the original game to help them if they get lost or bored.
• Friendly Fandoms: After the release of the redesigned Xen, there has been a minor, yet significant overlap between fans of Black Mesa and fans of Subnautica, with many fans comparing Xen's new aesthetics and its music tracks to Subnautica's. It also helps that both games feature the same theme of a lone human stranded in a dangerous, but stunningly beautiful alien world, while having to traverse through abandoned and ruined remains of both human and alien habitats.
• Genius Bonus:
  • Some of the whiteboards feature actual scientific concepts, such as inorganic chemistry, biology and quantum physics.
  • The scientist in "Anomalous Materials" who's reviewing a research paper written by one Dr. Truman bemoans his misuse of the Boltzmann constant and misspelling of "Chandrasekhar limit".
• Good Bad Bugs: Even despite a large amount of effort put into the mod, some glitches - either via oversights or from the Source engine itself - exist. Thankfully, few truly hamper the game in any way and some tend to do unintended things.
  • When fighting the helicopter in Surface Tension, if you run back into the room where you get the rocket launcher and then run back out, the helicopter is rotated ninety degrees to one side. It can't turn from this position, so it can't hit you, turning That One Boss into a walk in the park.
  • When a security guard gets within melee range of an enemy, they stop firing. This can be rather frustrating at the beginning of the game when you're unarmed and reliant on a security guard to kill enemies for you. Thankfully, you can get past them on your own without taking damage.
• It's the Same, Now It Sucks!: The reveal that the earliest version of the paid release not only added no real new content other than multiplayer but also failed to fix some of the bugs in the mod release while simultaneously introducing several new ones has caused some ire among the fans. This would eventually be averted with the open beta of Xen, which would make the retail version worthy of the price.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • The world's smallest coffee cup.^Explanation A styrofoam cup model found in-game is slightly smaller than one would expect, which A Jolly Wangcore took note of in one of his streams. One of the developers happened to be watching the stream at the time, and a few days later presented Jolly a recording of scientist voice actor Michael Hillard reciting his comments about the conspicuously small cup.
  • Xen when?^Explanation The extended wait for the Xen chapters caused many a fan to ask this question. For a time, sending a message with this question in the Crowbar Collective Discord server would trigger a bot to respond with "Soon™" (which was changed to "Xen now" once all the chapters were available via a public beta), and an achievement added in the final release for not jumping into the Lambda teleporter was named after it.
• Narm:
  • The HECU marines' dialogue in the original release was... somewhat forced, to say the least, consisting primarily of villainous one-liners and comedic quips. The developers themselves would later describe them as "80s Action Movie villains". This was addressed in the retail release, which features rewritten and rerecorded dialogue.
  • The Gargantuas have a pretty frightening appearance... which is dulled a little by the fact that they use the generic "angry bear" roar. It sounds more silly than scary.
• Rescued from the Scrappy Heap: Several weapons have been beefed up, making them far more useful throughout the game. Sure, the (official) ammo reserve counts have been decreased overall, but the increased usability from almost every weapon helps balance things out.
  • The MP5. No longer is it the rapid-fire pea-shooter in terms of conventional bullets that can't hit the broad side of a barn, or its launched grenades flying through the sky as if Gordon were on the moon. Now, the gun is far more accurate and hard-hitting, being perfectly usable against the HECU marines that often use this weapon, and its grenades now fly a lot faster through the air and produce a more powerful explosion to boot. Both, however, come with fairly significant ammunition cuts, with both its magazine and reserve ammo being cut back by 40% (50 to 30 rounds and 250 to 150 rounds respectively) while the grenade launcher can only hold 3 grenades in reserve compared to the original 10.
  • The Hivehand has been buffed overall, and the Nerf to ammo capacities for most weapons make its regenerative ammo qualities that much more important.
  • Snarks are a bit more reliable, now willing to chomp up aliens as well as marines.
  • The Long Jump Module, as well as the sheer number of platforming sections, were a big part of why so many people disliked Xen in the original game. As such, they took out most of the platforming and made Long Jumping a lot easier to perform (all you have to do is press space twice in succession, while Half-Life had you crouch then quickly press jump while moving forward, which was rather awkward).
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • The Source engine has ladders, just like the original! The Source engine's ladders are broken, just like the original! Just as in the original, while they can't quite be said to not work, they are all but guaranteed to misbehave in such a way as to produce a series of frustrating deaths.
  • Crouch-jumping, which is required pretty much every time jumping is necessary and requires two button presses rather than one^note and heaven help you if you need to perform a running crouch jump. Some wonder why the normal jump even exists at all when it's so completely useless. To everyone's delight, the retail version introduced an option for auto crouch-jump.
  • The radiation static gets a lot of hatred, mostly because it can obscure the player's vision a lot even in minor areas, can be triggered even when the player isn't being irradiated but is standing near a radiated area, has been reported to cause headaches and nausea, and in earlier versions of the game could not be turned off in the options. Thankfully, the Definitive Edition allows players to switch it off.
  • It's portrayed as being much more realistic here, but vent crawling, in general, has become greatly despised in Black Mesa particularly because it's so slow to move through the vents compared to the original game where you were practically running at top speed through them. Most who have played Black Mesa believe this to be the reason the vent maze in "We've Got Hostiles!" didn't make the final cut.
• Signature Scene:
  • The first scene in Xen, due to the utterly gorgeous backgrounds and environments, and made especially notable because Xen in the original Half-Life was the Trope Namer for Disappointing Last Level.
  • The impressively detailed cliffside vista in "Surface Tension" is just as memorable, serving as one of the most iconic parts of the game since its initial reveal in the 2008 trailer.
• Suspiciously Similar Song:
  • The 0:53 mark at "Surface Tension 3" (where Gordon gets chased down by a Gargantua) sounds very reminiscent of "The Mission, Part 2" from Saints Row: The Third.
  • The melody from "Questionable Ethics 1" is almost completely identical to the one from "Ezio's Family" from Assassin's Creed II.
  • "Harbinger" seems to take cues from the Half-Life: Decay main menu theme.
• That One Achievement: This game seriously has an obsession with achievements based around carrying objects from previous chapters to later ones.
  • Rare Specimen, especially in the retail version. The original mod had the hat in a container in Lambda Core, meaning that one must carry the hat throughout the chapter (and it's not easy to bring the hat through the teleporters). In the retail version, the hat is in an alcove during Unforeseen Consequences, meaning that one must carry the hat throughout the entire game. It was inspired by 'Little Rocket Man' from Half-Life 2: Episode Two which required you to do something similar with a garden gnome. The difference is that HL2E2 is much shorter than Black Mesa. In addition, the hat is prone to buggy behaviour; carrying it up ladders boils down to arduous trial-and-error, it will sometimes force you to reload a save due to it randomly not being interactable (particularly in On a Rail when it falls off the cart), and carrying it through teleporters in Lambda Core is a frustrating, unpredictable ordeal.
    • Taken up to eleven with the Rarest Specimen achievement, which requires you to take the hat to the Nihilanth's chamber. The hat's shape means it's likely to roll off into the abyss of Xen if you aren't keeping a watchful eye on it, and taking it through the chase sequences in Gonarch's Lair and Interloper is far from easy. The worst part is that if you did Rare Specimen before, and made a save with the hat in Lambda Core to save time, you still have to start back at Unforeseen Consequences, as the update to 1.0 breaks compatibility with save files.
  • To a lesser extent, Pepperoni Precipitation. This requires you to take a pizza from Questionable Ethics to the Nihilanth's portal. While its square shape makes it less likely to roll, and its greater mass than the hat means it won't be blown into the stratosphere by a wayward explosion, it's also much bigger. This makes trying to climb ladders (especially the ladders after the Apache boss fight in Surface Tension) somewhat of a chore, as the box is likely to be knocked out of your hands.
  • The Plan and Unquestionably Ethical require Gordon to carry an easy-to-miss tank full of lethal chemicals from the labs in Xen to the end of Gonarch's Lair. Thankfully there's a part in the later chapter that has a small teleporter that can be used to transfer this tank past the majority of its duration. Near the end of Gonarch's Lair is a passage that will only open if this tank has been carried to the teleporter. From here, Gordon can either use the gas, killing Gonarch instantly and achieving The Plan, or jump across the rocks from this vantage point to the exit, leaving the Gonarch alive and achieving Unquestionably Ethical. If that wasn't enough, this exclusive area holds both a Protozoan and an HEV corpse for the sake of the Prolific Popper and Post-Mortem Interval achievements. Woe be to those who missed these two bits.
• That One Boss:
  • The Tentacles from Blast Pit are much harder to sneak around than in the original. Unlike the original, they'll not calm down if you sit still for a few seconds. They'll continue to randomly bash away at the silo platforms hoping to find you, and if they do make contact with you, it'll be a relentless attack until you're dead. Not even the ladders are safe havens this time. Of course, since you get satchel charges a lot earlier this time around (right before you go into the blast chamber), you can still sneak past them if you get creative.
  • The helicopter in Surface Tension, right after you get the rocket launcher. It does a lot of damage, it manoeuvres around your cover pretty well, it can unleash a hail of rockets to kill you with splash damage, and it takes a lot of rockets to bring down.
    • When you first encounter the Apache, on the dam, is even tougher. You will be encountering it directly after a very tough fight with the Marines stationed around the dam, there's likely to be at least two more Marines attacking you whilst you're dealing with it, and this is before you get the rocket launcher: Your only effective weapon against it is the Tau Cannon, which can quickly run out of ammo. Oh, directly after this you're going to be face-planted into an Ichthyosaur-infested reservoir too. Good luck.
    • Its durability in the game's commercial version received a significant nerf in that three rockets will destroy it already on normal difficulty - which doesn't mean that its attacks are less lethal.
  • The marine ambush at the end of "Questionable Ethics". Two full waves of soldiers who can flank you from at least 3 different directions, plus two more soldiers watching through a roof window to make sure you have a hard time manoeuvring to better cover. For bonus points, this encounter wasn't in the original Half-Life.
  • The Mêlée à Trois in the middle of "Surface Tension". An Osprey will constantly drop half a dozen HECU soldiers on you at a time, and there's a group of Alien Grunts in the mix who can also do pretty good damage. Granted, the section is much easier if you save rocket launcher ammo or use the ammo around the area, as two good hits on Normal difficulty take the Osprey down.
• That One Level: Interloper took a huge spike in difficulty. With the levels being larger, additional enemies, and the Alien Controllers being more relentless than ever, Gordon's in for a tough fight. It helps that much of the ammo provided within is rockets and energy ammo, mainly for the Gluon Gun which is the weapon most suitable for killing Alien Controllers. Of note is the elevator ride near the end of the chapter; there's barely any cover to use against the enemy's attacks, and the number of enemies presented put Serious Sam to shame.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: There's quite a debate about some of the changes made from the original Half-Life.
  • Many of these issues are over small things, such as weapon placement, nerfs/buffs to weapons and voice acting.
  • The largest debates, however, are over the "On a Rail" and "Surface Tension" chapters and the vast cuts made to them. The former was subject to practically an entire restructuring of its content with only a few areas from the original game being remade, and the latter had everything between the Marines shooting the vent and the Gargantua chase cut. The latter level eventually had its cut sections fully restored in an update patch to the retail version, though On A Rail remains unrestored to the displeasure of many.
  • It's not as much as either the "On a Rail" or "Surface Tension" debates, but on rare occasions, you'll see a complaint crop up regarding the vent maze being cut out of "We've Got Hostiles".
  • Gargantuas being completely invulnerable outside of scripted sequences gets some flak, too, as some considered it a fun challenge to kill them with explosives. The console command "sk_gargantua_debug_allow_death 1," which makes explosive attacks kill them after a while, implies that they planned to make them killable but ultimately scrapped it.
  • The cuts to the ammo reserves. This results in a lot of ammo pickups just going to waste. One popular mod restores Gordon's carrying space to its former glory.
  • For whatever reason the 357 and Crossbow ammo pickups provide two magazines worth of ammo as opposed to one. While this does allow the Revolver and Crossbow more liberal use, the problem is that the reduced ammo reserves make it very fast to cap out on such ammo, and said ammo pickups are often provided at the typical rate, resulting in wasted ammo drops. The original game, obviously, never had this (and had its MP5 ammo provisions only yield a half magazine).
  • Although the majority of the fanbase has been completely enamoured by the sheer beauty and scale of the Xen redesign, there is a small, but very vocal minority that are very much not impressed with the rework and prefer the original Xen design from Half-Life, arguing that the rework tries way too hard to be gorgeous by copying from Subnautica's aesthetics, and that Xen should look alien and otherworldly in an unsettling way, not in a pretty way. Because of the long wait, and the sheer level of effort the developers put into creating the new Xenery, discussions about this between both sides virtually never end well.
  • NPC dialogue, of all things, falls into this. For instance, the change in one HECU soldier's speech from "This guy's been killing my buddies" to "This guy's been killing Marines" when discussing Gordon Freeman has been met with mixed reception; some believe it to be a downgrade from how personal the original line felt, while others feel that the new line is less cheesy and more like something an actual soldier might say.
• Visual Effects of Awesome: The Xen levels are the sort of thing that you'd be unsurprised to find in a modern release, and are utterly gorgeous in many places. The vast ecosystems, wild colors, and advanced lighting took what was once barren and boring and made it a genuine joy to behold.
• Ugly Cute: Black Mesa steps up the vaguely adorable nature of Houndeyes by letting you find packs of them at rest. The little whistling sounds they make when they sleep!^note Houndeyes could be found sleeping in the original Half-Life too, but due to a bug their eyes didn't close
• Underused Game Mechanic: There are far fewer Scientists who are willing to follow you around the normal way, instead of staying put all the time or moving in scripted sequences. It's a shame when you need healing the most.
• The Woobie:
  • Those poor scientists who are trapped in an elevator in "Unforeseen Consequences", particularly since you can hear one sobbing and saying she doesn't want to die. Even worse, you don't have your crowbar yet in this version, meaning you have to push the button and make them fall to their deaths.
  • The two Vortigaunts that are on the receiving end of a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown at the beginning of "Interloper". While all the Vortigaunts in "Interloper" are mistreated by the more powerful aliens, this scene best shows the base cruelty of their masters.
• Woobie Species: While the Vortigaunts were already this as detailed on the original Half-Life YMMV page, this version manages to make it even worse by showing you how wretched their lives are on Xen. Early in "Interloper", you find a pair of sickly Vorts being beaten bloody by a pair of Alien Grunts, and even after you intervene, they're still quivering and weeping in the corners. Later, you encounter a group living in a slum village, and you can tell just by watching how miserable they all are — even before a couple of Controllers show up and force them to fight you. Oh, and remember how the Grunts were implied in the original to be manufactured? Turns out they're made from Vortigaunts. We get to see something of the process, and it's not pretty.

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