Recent reviews by alyusenka

And I say this as a person who played HL back in the day, circa 1999. Black Mesa improves everything that could be improved, fixes everything that needed fixing, and overall just makes HL a better, smoother, and more enjoyable experience. Don't get me wrong, the original HL remains a perfectly playable and fun game and completely deserves its cult status as a classic, but BM succeeds in making it BETTER. Interloper is still a major pain, though, but I guess it's by design because it was a pain in Half Life.

I recommend BM to those who played the original HL and to those who didn't. Nostalgia is a nice bonus, but it's not required.

And at least try to do the purple hat achievements properly as they're a nice challenge for the masochistically inclined. Remember all the swearwords you think you have forgotten and haven't used in years while you drag the hat around and it clips through things, including (sometimes) the floor/ground, randomly disappears, gets stuck, becomes impossible to pick up, falls off ledges, plummets down into a deadly abyss, gets blown off by the slightest movement, not to mention explosions, fails to teleport properly, and is left behind a permanently closed door. Lots of fun, annoyance, frustration, and outright rage, along with (potentially dramatically) increased playtime guaranteed! Great for people who are worried that the game might be too short: just do the hat delivery thing as a NG+ if you want to suffer and/or an extra challenge.

I've played worse. (For example, Syndrome.) Solarix is better, which is very, very faint praise as the game is far from polished.

Stealth is wonky. Sometimes there's no way enemies could see you, but they do. In complete darkness. A mile away. When you were not even moving. Enemies also occasionally glitch out in bizarre ways, e.g., sometimes they just freeze in place.

Unpredictable stealth is made worse by the lack of manual saves/quicksaves. There are only checkpoints. Cue jogging simulator from checkpoint location to the place where you failed. (Sometimes you'll have to jog for a long time.) And repeat and repeat and repeat. I recommend backing up your saves, by the way, because they may get corrupted.

Play only if you've already exhausted your supply of horror/sci-fi/stealth games and don't mind the found notes/emails/audiologs as a storytelling tool. Solarix is not unplayable or that bad, really, but there are better games. Such as games that inspired Solarix: System Shock 2, Thief, and Dead Space.