The most iconic Half-Life enemy of all time is the headcrab zombie, and Black Mesa shows players a new variation of this monster that is better and more ingenious than anything Valve has ever done with the creature. Although it's been in development for many, many years, Black Mesa (which is a recreation of the original Half-Life in the Source 2 engine) has finally been released, and the final version is everything long-time Half-Life fans could have hoped for.

Not only does Black Mesa perfectly recreate and remaster sections from the original Half-Life game, but it also incorporates elements from Half-Life 2 and other present-day gameplay ideas which make the entire experience more rewarding and enjoyable, even for people who have played through the first Half-Life hundreds of times before. Locations are altered and enhanced, movement controls (such as Gordon's awkward crouch-jump) are simplified, and there are even new enemy variants to encounter.

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It's in these new enemy encounters that Black Mesa really stands out and becomes less of a remastering of the original Half-Life and more of an evolution. While the first game only saw players battling against one kind of headcrab, one kind of houndeye, and one kind of Vortigaunt, Black Mesa instead introduces a variety of enemy variants with different degrees of powers. Nowhere in the game are Black Mesa's changes felt more strongly than in its version of Xen, the alien world which makes up the final chapters of Half-Life's story campaign.

How Black Mesa Makes Half-Life Even Better

Half Life Headcrab Hazard Suit Black Mesa

In Black Mesa, Xen is not just an enemy planet that Gordon gets transported to and bounces around in, but it is actually a living, breathing world, filled with much more evidence of past exploration than just a random dead scientist here and there. In Black Mesa's version of Half-Life's last few levels, the Black Mesa Research Facility has set up massive outposts in Xen and have clearly been conducting experiments for a long time. While it may just be Gordon Freeman's first day on the job, a lot of Black Mesa's employees appear to have been living on Xen for a while, clearly evidenced by all their discarded technical equipment and corpses.

However, it's here where Black Mesa players encounter a new variant of headcrab monster, something more more thematically relevant and also more dangerous than anything players have seen yet. While searching through the ruins Xen's scientific outposts, players come across headcrab zombies. However, these headcrab zombies are wearing hazard suits, the same special suit worn by Black Mesa scientists like Gordon Freeman. These headcrab zombies aren't only scarier than the ones which came before, but they're also harder to kill. In the same way that the player's hazard suit protects them from gunfire and falls, so too does it work for the headcrab zombies who are currently embodying them.

Showing a hazard suit user as a headcrab zombie is an ingenious way to not only ramp up the enemy's difficulty and danger potential, but it also helps to tell the story of what happened to the scientists on Xen. Clearly they were overrun by the monsters, and seeing enemies walking around in the same outfits that the player is currently wearing seems like the best possible way to demonstrate that Gordon is just as fragile as anyone else, despite having made it so far. It's effective, it's scary, it's surprising, and it's the best possible thing Black Mesa could have done to make Half-Life's most iconic enemies even better.

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