Recent reviews by Radical Russian

Was that it?
Even for a prologue this was short. The performance was horrible even on 7800x3d and 3080ti.
When the headcrabs turn over, it seems like they're invulnerable to physics objects with the gravity gun.

But I wanna say what it shows does look like quality. It is promising for the full project borealis if they can optimize it, that is. A nice reminder of what we're all missing after all these years.

Had the performance been great I would've liked it. I prefer a fluid 120fps, no higher is needed but below 100 becomes uncomfortable. I don't care if it means worse graphics. I played on low settings at 3440 x 1440 and seeing drops to 60 and 70, most of the time around 80-90 with DLSS at 70%. I do think that optimizing it will be a huge challenge for the devs due to choice of Unreal Engine 5 however.

When Borealis finnally releases we will probably be 2-3 hardware generations ahead from now and it might pass the line at that point.

is ok

I can't believe it's free. The quality of this "mod" is top notch. The combat is fun unlike the actual half life 2 and episodes. Somehow Breadmen made it feel great on the source engine.

Besides the twists and plot and mixes of all the valve lore, this is a labor of love.

I found one bug throughout the game, and that's the pistol you get later on where you can change firemode. if you change to burst fire, you can fire once and it breaks (can't fire or switch firemodes). Reloading lets you fire once again.

Expect 5-6 hours for a normal playthrough on medium.

If I was only reviewing the first half (to about chapter 11) this review would've been negative.

Lack of attention to detail, badly scripted events that didn't work well, npc's waiting or getting stuck during scenes.
The crowbar feels like HL1 which is for the better, except almost all material properties have been set wrong.

I always adored the attention to detail in Half Life 2 where hitting something with the crowbar would sound right. Plastic would sound like plastic, metal like metal. Dirt, sand, bricks, flesh. All would have it's own sound.
Much to my dismay a lot of the rocks in Black Mesa apparently consists of plastic, as does many of the flesh and metal pieces in Xen. Hell the metal elevators in xen even made plastic crate physics sounds when moving which can only be an oversight.

I gotta admit I was turned off. Recycle bins that would tip themselves up again, like there's a force added to their upright parameters, Random can sounds often playing.

I got stuck in on rails due to a bug where I couldn't go back and get the train cart for a part where it was necessary. I couldn't find a save, nor any way to know how far back it would be.

I've seen better G-man impressions than the voice actor for him in this game.

Weapon feel could be better, and I miss the vacuum sound of the gluon gun. But weapon feel is just the source engines default.

Leaving the negatives behind, seeing the game for what it is and it's price. It's actually good. I began enjoying the game in the latter half, from around chapter 12.
I wanna praise the hard work you did on Xen and keeping it out till it was finished. It was the right call. Xen is amazing, and the music feels great. The twists of Xen seem amazing too, it feels like what Valve would've done if they had time. A great interpretation that I would recommend over the original game.

I think Black Mesas biggest issue is not deviating even more from the original - would've loved more fan-lore in Xen. The deviations are actually the strongest points of the game.
Xen and the chapters leading up to it is why I will recommend the game. Being fair it'll always be worth 14,99 - especially if you haven't played half-life 1 before, or you wish to revisit it.

gut

Normally I'm not an advocate for vehicle sections in story driven shooters. But this vehicle section is some of the most fun I've had with a video game. The pace, controls and handling is amazing. It's fun. An entire game could be based around it. After finishing the race I had to come here to write how amazing the vehicle section is.

I was looking forward to Aftershock after playing the base game. I was happy they delayed it and said it was shaping out to be more than they initially were expecting. And it shows. You guys did an amazing job with this title. I'll cross my fingers it won't be the last time we see Shelly on the build engine, and that goes for Voidpoint developing on it as well. The release came out of nowhere. I hope more people discover it as they really should play this. I haven't seen much marketing which this (dlc) expansion deserves.

Besides the vehicle section, the expansion is lots better than the base game. So far I've had less sewers, less of the endless underground corridors and more open maps. It feels a lot more like "The birth" chapter from Duke Nukem atomic edition in regards to the levels, yet better. It just feels better.

And for knowing what they have to work with engine-wise, this is all an amazing achievement. No performance drops (unlike phantom fury).

My critique is the same as for the base game. The Uzis are still a bit boring and unsatisfying to use as a weapon, it really lacks some type of AR that would be satisfying to get headshots with.
Sometimes you're really banged up from max health and armor to 0 in a second. You're not the one man army you might feel like in some other old-school shooters. But duke and blood were the same way on higher difficulties, and it's better than the game not being challenging.

Get Aftershock, it's worth it.

The perk system is a bit lackluster, and BJ is a bit too sweet for good old anya. But amazing story over all, a true singleplayer experience of which we need more.

The only two good maps are gone.
rip cs militia
rip cs assault

The Gamebryo engine, or "Creation Engine" as Bethesda proudly calls it has shown it's age since Skyrim. This time they wen't too far to try to make graphics that match other modern titles for what this engine will ever be able to handle. Performance is absolutely horrible, way below expectation.

Before buying the game, ask yourself what your expectation to performance is. Are you okay with 60 fps? Then perhaps you can buy it if you have a 4080 and intel i9 9900K and above and that you are using at maximum a 1440p panel and you're okay with using FSR2 with upscaling for the resolutionscale. It looks horrible.
For reference, my expectations of modern games is that I can reach at the very least an average of 90 fps, preferably 120+ on new games at low-medium settings. Anything below is not acceptable.

I first tried the game at a friends place during early access, he bought the package that contained the preview. We were immensely disappointed.
He sports a 8700K, 32GB DDR4 ram at 3600mhz CL16, Samsung EVO sata SSD without QLC cache memes, and lastly an RTX 4080. Although he does use a 4k display.
Immediately upon moving around it felt sluggish. Turning on an FPS counter revealed a framerate in the caverns
Lowering most settings to medium and using FSR2 at 60% resolutionscale got him to 50-60 fps.

I went home thinking if i should get it on release. I told myself, yeah the 8700K is old. And it's not an NVMe like bethesda recommends and oh, day one patch and drivers will fix it!
My specs: R9 5900X, RTX 3080TI, 32GB DDR4 3200mhz CL14 and samsung 980 pro nvme, ultrawide 3440x1440 display.
Needless to say, I was wrong.
In atlantis I get an average framerate at low-medium settings, 70% resolution scale using the DLSS2 mod of 53 fps. On kreed I was lucky to get around 57. And the game doesn't even look good! I was able to hit 70 fps in empty-space.

The game needs more time in the oven as well. I experienced bugs when seeing the game at his place, as well as when I played it myself. The bugs are part of bethesda games, I don't mind the non gamebreaking. But landing the ship being unable to move sucks, npcs moving in ticks/waves during dialogue, large sutters when opening inventory, map and dialogue with an NPC.

Bethesda should stop using Creation Engine just to be able to reuse systems and assets from previous games. Bethesda owns id Software which in turn means they have full licensing to the Id Tech engine. Look at Doom eternal. it's gorgeous. It runs at 200 fps in 4k with mediocre hardware. Use what you have, take the time to improve. And stop using a 26 year old engine. Even with improvements throughout the years the engine it falls short in both visuals and performance of just about any other engine out there.

The recommended specifications will bring you 30-40 fps on 1080p as youtube videos show.

UI is rendered at 30 FPS, there's some mods that try to fix this too. (like when aiming in space)

The game itself seems to have an interesting premise. I hope to play it again in the future, and hopefully buy it on a sale. I'll attempt to refund it. If nothing is done, then wait for a 15900K and RTX 6090 gpu or higher to attempt 70+ fps average at 4k.

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