In 2025, I decided I wanted a new shooter to play after being on hiatus from the genre for a while. I ended up landing on the Half-Life series, playing through all the games aside from Alyx until this point. Alyx will come sometime later in 2026. After taking a short break from the series due to genre fatigue, I was ready to jump back in and play Black Mesa.

Black Mesa is a fan-made reimagining of Half-Life in the source engine. It has updated graphics, an extended and modified story, and my favourite addition, achievements. The graphics are so well done that I had trouble running the game on my Nvidia GTX 1060. The 1060 is reaching over 10 years old at this point, but I didn't expect a game from 2020 to be so demanding. Aside from some tweaks to the enemy AI, the gameplay and guns felt almost identical to Half-Life, which I found enjoyable. Music has also been added to the game to make certain scenes feel more impactful and cinematic. Other than them being mixed a little too loud, their addition made me feel epic.

The extended story mentioned before was related to Xen. In the original game, Xen frustrated me most often than not. It was confusing, difficult to navigate, and most of your time was spent in caves you had to crouch around in. As part of the reimagining, the Crowbar Collective decided to recreate Xen from scratch. It addresses the problems I had with Half-Life, but it comes at the cost of not being lore accurate. Half-Life's lore has always been ambiguous, but Xen was supposed to be a world uninhabited with life. They did the opposite here and made it feel like the aliens were native to Xen. Since it's a reimagining and not a remake, I don't mind it, but I wouldn't play Black Mesa as your only, canonical Half-Life experience.

I do have two negative things I want to comment on, however. Shooters and boss fights usually don't lend well together. In my opinion, they can be easy to mess up. I can't think of many shooters with true boss fights that stood out and made me think, “yeah, that added to the game substantially”. The Gonarch is one of these. This is easily the worst boss fight I've encountered in an FPS, and maybe even in a video game ever. The boss has too much health. It has too many types of attacks. It summons enemies so small that you can't kill them without an explosive or your crowbar. It charges you, and requires you to dodge its attack within 500ms, or it follows you mid-dodge and hit's you anyway. The absolute worst part is that you have to fight it twice with the same amount of health in an even smaller arena than the first time. The Source Engine was not built for this type of fight or this type of precise movement. You get caught on EVERYTHING you possibly can when attempting to dodge. It sucks, and I hate that I had to fight this boss four times, but we'll get to that in the completionist section.

So, is it worth completing?

All achievements were obtained on the hardest difficulty.

While the original Half-Life didn't have achievements, Half-Life 2 did. The achievements in Black Mesa mimic the achievement style of Half-Life 2. However, I have many mixed feelings about the game as a whole. Achievements are a mixed bag in pretty much every video game. It shouldn't be a secret to any completionist that achievements are often tacked on because developers feel like they need to have them. It's at its worst here. I have a lot to say about the achievements, but I also want to comment on the replayability.

Black Mesa's achievements are set up in a typical format of for a story shooter. Beat the game, then cherry-pick the achievements you missed. When I encounter games like this, I have no problem going back and getting specific achievements. You're allowed to pick which chapter you want to start in, making it easy to go back and get the ones you missed. With that said, the developers made an egregious choice in an attempt to pay homage to Half-Life 2 and Half-Life Alyx. There are three different achievements that require you to carry an object to another point in the game. One covers the ENTIRE game, one covers half the game, and the last covers a quarter of the game. It's not the worst thing about the achievements here, but it feels excessive and demotivating, especially when you're doing it for your third time. Or the source engine bugs out, and you lose the item completely.

Now, there's something I want to address because I know other completionist have thought about this as well. There's a good bit of achievements that require you to kill specific enemies with specific weapons. I know first hand that a lot of them can feel like a chore, and I tend to agree. However, in Black Mesa, it requires you to use all the weapons, rather than the ones that are typically just good. Forcing you to use weapons you normally wouldn't in ways you normally wouldn't felt enjoyable here. Figuring out how to get enemies to run into your tripwires or killing a fast-moving unit with a slow, aim-based weapon felt fun.

I've come back to edit this review a few times while writing it. After I beat the game for the first time and started cherry-picking achievements, I was having a great time. I said it was a near perfect completionist game multiple times throughout. However, I can't stand by that anymore. I'm changing my opinion to just being okay. It doesn't have much to do with the achievements, apart from what I said about the “carry x to y” achievements.

In my review, I said Xen was great and addressed the problems I had in the original. Playing it again, I was wrong. Xen is fun exactly once. Having to play through it again, especially Interloper, really shows how poorly made it is. The pacing is somewhere around one of the worst I've ever experienced in a video game. It re-uses puzzles multiple times, they got lazy at the end and give you infinite ammo for an overpowered weapon, and the whole Alien Grunt creation facility is slow and painful. I had to stop every 20–30 minutes because I couldn't handle how monotonous it was. I made a comment to my partner during my first playthrough that the end of the game felt a little long compared to the first half. I'm realizing that's because it truly overstayed its welcome. The novelty of it being my first time is what carried me through.

You're probably asking why would this affect the completionist rating? Because you need to play through ALL of Xen THREE TIMES. If you look up an achievement guide, you can get that down to two, but that's already one (almost two) too many. The earth side of the game is fun, and I had a good time playing through it every time I had to. Even the first half of Xen became more enjoyable when I was able to turn it into a speed running challenge. But Interloper… Wow. Off the top of my head, I can't think of another video game that instantly kills all momentum right before the final boss fight.

3/50 Achievements that stood out

• PhD in Pacifism: Don't kill any of the Vortigaunts in the border world.
• Our Brains And Your Brawn: Assemble all possible guards and scientists at the end of Office Supplies.
• Late for Work: Defeat the Nihilanth in under 4 minutes.

These were either challenging or added to the already existing puzzles within the levels. This is what I'd consider perfect achievement design. I wish there was more of them.

_{Published 25 January 2026 @ 10:57:25 PM UTC}

End of Game Information

Total Time Played: 42 hours, 55 minutes