Much to my dismay and lack of understanding as to why someone would try to revamp the classic (and old) Half-Life game without any real backing or direct support from Valve, Black Mesa was eventually released. Fortunately that doesn't exactly mean you'll just be playing "Half-Life Source", because Black Mesa is not simply a visual update, it is a game play update as well. It takes most of the fundamentals and guards them closely, but at the same time breaks apart the game and puts it back together with some serious sexy looking, albeit not so sturdy duct-tape.
The game begins just like Half-Life, though instead of the screen filling up with "Half-Life", it of course fills with "Black Mesa". The game fades into the train ride into Black Mesa, the familiar, monotonic female voice ringing from behind your head as you survey your delve deep into this enormous facility. Eventually stepping off the ride to (finally) get a grip of all of your controls and just like Half-Life, shit goes wrong and you gotta to get the hell out of there. So this is Half-Life. Plain and simple, this is Half-Life. Let me say it again. This is Half-Life. If you came into this game expecting anything even remotely robust and extremely different other than graphics then this isn't the game you wanted. This is not Half-Life 3 and it doesn't pretend to be.
Most (if not all) of the game's music has been completely re scored by Joel Nielsen. Who brings a solid, dark, and menacingly synthesized score which sometimes leaves you pleasantly wondering what the hell is around the next corner, or in the ventilation shaft behind you. Surprisingly emotional, this soundtrack is a must-have. There were some really unexpected and somewhat pale parallels to be expected, but this game on its own is far more of a big showing of how much the Half-Life community as a whole still wants that third game to be released. Unfortunately sometimes the end product is not always so telling of that.
They've redone some sections of the beginning of the game that completely make no sense, for example the addition of flares that somehow magically appeared in almost all of the rooms, the nerfing of the crowbar, and the total lack of ammo throughout a good two quarters of the game becomes very redundant, especially because half of the game was remade so even if you've recently played and beaten Half-Life, you won't get very far here using that as a point of reference.
All in all, this game is a solid mock-up of what could possibly come next and like many things in life this has some cracks in it, but these can easily be overlooked as you start to realize that this is truly a completely new and inventive immersion into Black Mesa that'll have you wanting to play Half-Life 2 and honestly hoping Gabe Newell will just start spilling news about Half-Life 3.