I played Half-Life some years ago but eventually dropped it. Since then, I've had this preconceived notion that Half-Life is lame and stupid for some reason. And maybe the original game is, but Black Mesa is great!

It's just a really solid shooter. The movement feels smooth and slippery and fast. All the weapons feel so powerful and impactful. Sprinting while shooting with perfect accuracy is really fun. The game doesn't always play music, but when it does, it's super freaking hype. I liked the overall pacing. Similar to RE4, everything takes place in one day back to back to back. Each chapter picks up right where the last one left off and you go on the entire journey that Gordon does with no breaks.

The game has some stupid bits, like cable puzzles that last way too long, areas where it's not too clear where to go, and some combat encounters where you just get pummeled with bullets and don't have a chance to fight back. Also the audio levels are just super fucked up. Can't hear anything anyone says over the music and SFX. Surprised the devs never added a Dialogue volume slider. The pacing got a bit slower in the second half, sometimes there would be not very much shooting, just puzzles.

But this is a fun game, I understand the hype now :D

¯\(ツ)/¯

gunplay is whatever. not that satisfying or fun.
story is whatever. never cared about anyone.

it just kinda felt like a dlc with a separate story that you don't really care about. the lack of a final boss cemented this feeling. the entire experience was super forgettable.

Lovely aesthetic, interesting story, golf sucks.

God damn this game actually made me more frustrated than Getting Over It or Jump King. The golfing felt so wrong. The ball would either fly way too far, or barely move at all - it didn't feel like I had control. And yeah you have to wait ages after each shot for your guy to fly over to the ball. Oh, I also switched to story mode early on because I was playing this for a video. Gameplay was still super annoying though.

I liked the idea of the radio and thought it was implemented pretty well. But at times the storytelling could be a bit overwhelming. There were fragments of the story told under each level name (which were in the same font, making things extra confusing), there were also the diary entries, and then there was the radio which played constantly over the top of these other things, which made it really hard to focus on reading anything. When you pause the game to read a diary entry, the radio should also pause.

Yeah idk the golfing just made me wanna rip out my hair

I have officially beaten all the 2D Zeldas! (besides four swords i guess(wait does phantom hourglass count as 2D or 3D))

This was super fun! I like how they had multiple gimmicks in this game instead of just one. The cloning and the shrinking were both neat and were never frustrating. This is a more linear Zelda game that felt smaller in scale and I like that! Just a cute little romp where you get to play as Toon Link. There were also some really good dungeons and mini-dungeons. Wind Palace was sick just on the aesthetic alone.

Being the last of the 2D Zelda games I played, there just wasn't really anything groundbreakingly new for me. I've seen it all before :P Also, just like most Zelda games, there are moments of confusion where I can't figure out where to go in the overworld between dungeons, which are my favourite parts of the games.

Overall, this is still a super fun romp and severely underrated! I literally have never heard anyone talk about this game.

I love Getting Over It and have beaten it hundreds of times. I was excited for this game, it looked the most similar to Getting Over It out of any other rage-bait game out there. Living up to the "foddian" name it talks about in the steam description.

But the core gameplay is just too annoying and painful. Like it literally hurts my hands to play this game for more than 10 minutes. Having to hold down the buttons and yoink my mouse super fast and hard to swing is like the least ergonomic activity in the world. So I'm refunding this game sorry.

The dev really did nail the style of Getting Over It perfectly though.