It’s been seventeen years since Valve first rocked the (PC) gaming scene with the release of the beloved first-person shooter Half-Life. I have praised the series on this website in the past and the first entry into the franchise still stands as one of my all-time favorite games. One issue I have with it, though, is that Half-Life has become a tad difficult to run on modern systems, so I am quite happy to announce that the fan-remake Black Mesa has just released on Steam Early Access.
The most apparent upgrade this reimagining brings to the table is that the engine has been changed from GoldSrc to the much-newer Source engine, as well as all the visual upgrades one would expect. It’s great to see the Black Mesa research facility in renewed, graphical splendor and it makes the various zombies and other monsters you will be fighting a lot more threatening than before.
Why put a remake of a game this old on Early Access? Well, the team plans to make some improvements to the base game and is not yet finished with the final stages, which are incidentally my least favorite parts anyway. Even though there is a clear estimate of how much percentage of the game is done, there is no confirmation on when the product will upgrade to a final version. In the words of the Crowbar Collective: “We feel it will take us considerable time to get the last 15% up to our standards, and putting a time estimate on it would be a total guess.”
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