Recent reviews by Gash

Black Mesa is a fantastic first-person-shooter on its own, but it's also one of the most ambitious fan-remakes in the history of video-games. Every single aspect of the game is upgraded to an entirely different level, while trying to keep the original ideas and themes of Half-Life.
From a gameplay point of view, it's very enjoyable, well paced (most of the times), and thrilling.
From a remake point of view, at times it improves greatly upon its source game, at other times it fails to retain the quality and themes of it.
The Xen chapters, which are the most ambitious and creative chapters of the game, seem misaligned and disjointed with the rest of the game. They feel like an another game, and everything almost completely changes, the music, gameplay, shooting, platforming, puzzles. Most of the puzzles in Xen seem very basic, and very repetitive. The shooting in Interloper is only using the Gluon Gun with infinite ammo, and the music tries to really distant itself from the chapters before it and also from Half-Life. But, these chapters still remained very enjoyable and intriguing for me.
And there were also chapters like, Surface Tension, Blast Pit and Questionable Ethics that outright blew me away. The very dark, gritty, industrial environment of Blast Pit makes Black Mesa almost an horror game. And similarly "Surface Tension" is a massive improvement, the parts where grunts are fighting with alien forces look like a movie. With the smokes rising, destroyed buildings, corpses everywhere, its poetic... And this is what Half-Life was known for back in the day, visual storytelling.

To keep the review brief, i didn't go into details, and only wrote about the parts that stood out the most for me. But in conclusion Black Mesa tries to be a different game (especially with its music), but it still tries to be a true and honest remake of Half-Life. It succeeds half of the times and also fails on the other half. But there's still so much to give praise to Crowbar Collective, the graphics, the insane amounts of details, the sounds effects, the soundtrack, the visuals of Xen chapters.
Overall, Black Mesa a really great game, I recommend to it everyone. But i could never recommend it to play it in place of Half-Life.