I am immensely thankful for a dystopian futuristic setting that is not based on a version of the United States of America taking over the entire world. What a breath of fresh air, a cyberpunk Polish Republic is so much more interesting than all the Kojima-styled game settings we usually get.

The game is at its best in the small interactions, where there is room for intricate worldbuilding and fantastic voice acting, but the main story made me lose interest a few hours in. Visually, it soon gets ugly, which is intentional, but it gets to the point of being detrimental to the gameplay; often the augmentation systems weirdly cover the entire screen and you can hardly see anything. The glitch effects make narrative sense but make the experience feel way in need of being remastered, which makes playing the System Redux version the obvious choice.

I slept on this franchise for too long. I never expected it to be this funny; mixing slapstick humor with the usual attempt at seriousness from contemporary western action movies really works out. While the design mainly supports the fantasy of elegant infiltration and thoughtful strategy, there is room for those "screw it, we are going loud" moments a la GTA, making failed runs actually enjoyable when you try to salvage the mission and get your targets down anyway.

The progression system has been discussed long enough at this point (yes, call it Metroidbrainia if you really want) but I really admire the amount of polish and the potential for more and more content, to me it justifies that such a thing as World of Assassination exists.

Regarding this volume specifically, all missions turned out to be neat sandboxes but Sapienza and Marrakesh do stand out in terms of level design. Also audio is incredibly satisfying.

MORRRRTADELOOOOO POWEEEEEERRRRRR

Rather than my own Black Mesa review, I think the analysis that could be of some interest here would be a breakdown of how it feels to play Half-Life for the first time in 2023. It was enlightening for me to realise how used I am to hand holding in games. I often found myself missing a quest log of some sort, or got lost without a clear goal: I know I have to go to Lambda, but where is that? Should I be able to see it from here? Am I going the right direction? Why am I entering the sewers? Should I really keep trying to reach that ledge? Why can't I remember what the last scientist told me? And so on. These are probably a problem with myself rather than flaws of the game, but still I found a few other issues related to the aging of the original material:

· Lack of exploration whatsoever: 95% of the time, if you can access some place, that is because it is the way to go. Again, this could be a problem with me being used to more modern sandbox games or open worlds, but since very early in the game my location awareness was warped.
· Platforming gets awful at times: narrow spaces and layouts with sometimes unreadable level design gave me more than one headache. It does get better with the tools from the late game, but still I would get stuck or have issues with hitboxes more often than what I would expect in this genre.
· AIs weak spots are common and easy to see.
· Autosaves can happen "anywhere", sometimes even mid-death; it is not really that impactful but lately I am finding that this type of issues triggers me more and more.
· Other technical issues derived from an engine which probably doesn't have much more to give, such as frequent crashes (uncharacteristic for my high-end machine) and a strange bug that kept changing my video settings to literally Potato quality.

A few counterpoints to back up why I can recommend Black Mesa:

· It has the coolest suit up scene in videogames that I can remember.
· It manages to create a feeling of real DISGUST with Headcrabs and Barnacles. Holy shit. Even if I am able to see how plain the instruments are (models, design, animations, audio), the sum of the parts provokes absolute revulsion in me. Brilliant.
· Its soundtrack is 👌.
· I know the hidden hat and pizza challenges get a lot of hate but I genuinely had a lot of fun carrying those items absurdly.