Two decades on, Half-Life’s combat holds up, and Echoes makes fantastic use of its weapons and enemies.Comparison of the Anomalous Materials lobby room in Half-Life (top) and Black Mesa (bottom)īlack Mesa is a first-person shooter game developed and published by Crowbar Collective. The climactic battle happens on a scale that outclasses Half-Life’s infamous Surface Tension chapter, a fight that repeatedly escalates like a microcosm of the mod as a whole. Perhaps a little too rapidly, as the difficulty spikes with the intensity, resulting in several transitional combat encounters that are much tougher than anything either before or afterward.įortunately, the last hour of Echoes moderates its tsunami of opponents with plentiful weapons and ammunition. Once Echoes starts doling out the heavier weapons, the mod ups the ante rapidly. That same monster hunts you throughout the mod’s running time, appearing at various points just to make your day that little bit more terrifying. Meanwhile, your personal resonance cascade comes in the form of a gargantuan monster, which traps you inside a train carriage alongside a bunch of other scientists before destroying everything in sight. In a splendid Alien-esque sequence, a strange sluglike monster hunts you through a tight cluster of corridors and vents as you desperately try to find a way out. The first half of Echoes is almost pure survival horror, limiting your arsenal to just a few weapons and making clever use of scripted scenarios to surprise the player.
The arrival of the marines, which in the original game is barely touched upon, is here given the kind of treatment you’d expect from a Call of Duty game, featuring a jet flyover and an almost parade-like column of solders, tanks, and twin-rotor helicopters. Even when the seams are visible, it’s beautifully done.īroadly, Echoes mimics the arc of Half-Life, but distils its key elements into more potent forms. One of my favourite aspects of the mod is how smoothly it repurposes dialogue from the old games to assemble its own conversations and narratives. Lights flicker and tremors shudder through the earth, while the scientists and security guards speculate on what’s going on. When the cascade occurs, it does so at a distance, unfolding as a gradual infrastructural collapse rather than an instant demolition. Even the very first area you spawn in, an underground car park, impresses with its cavernous scale and moody lighting.Īs with the original Half-Life, Echoes commences with a peaceful tour of its own segment of the Black Mesa facility, though smartly it lets you explore on foot rather than confining you inside a train. To begin with, the mod’s 20-odd maps are enormous and stunningly detailed.
What make Half-Life: Echoes stand out from other Black Mesa retellings is the sheer level of craft and ambition that has gone into it.
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