Playing Black Mesa, finaly.

I have a strong dislike for Black Mesa, and its almost entirely centered around the balancing. The original Half-Life is one of the finest tuned FPS games ever, normal feels perfectly balanced, but if you're good at the game Hard is also a well balanced affair, save for the Alien Grunts Hive hand, which do too much damage.

Black Mesa's balancing is completely fucked, due in large part to the HECU marines, and I know exactly why. It's because they use the Combine AI from HL2. If you've played HL2 you know its a pretty easy game even on the hardest difficulty, but I think that Valve realized that the balancing in hard was the ceiling in terms of enemy damage output before the combine start being able to melt you instantly.  

The natural inclination of mod makers who realize the HL2 is to easy is to up the damage values, but like I said if you up it anymore than Valve had without some serious rebalancing, the enemies can drain your entire health pool in seconds. 

Unfortunately Black Mesa falls into this trap, and Hard mode is just ball busting. Of course normal mode appears to be the base-line HL2 normal mode AKA a mind numbing cake walk. So pick your poison I guess. It blows my mind that no one has ever seen fit to point this out, but everyone seems too enamored by the graphics to notice that the gameplay is a significant step down...which is basically the case with every modern video game remake. 

Also yeah in my humble opinion Black Mesa Xen blows. Its way to fucking long which nobody noticed because everyone just loaded up their saved games from years ago when it hit 1.0, and its way to focused on gimmicky mechanics and set pieces for my liking.

I see decent enough number of people pointing out the decrease in gameplay quality but never from the exact balancing angle.

That said - combine certainly desn't fight like humans would. They have pretty nicely laid out decisionmaking model as I remember it but the brainwashed troops of alien overlord will obviously just stand and keep shooting a lot more than a soldier who'll probably pick a more engaging hit-and-run approach.

BM is a prefectlu aight way to re-play half-life, but it'll never have the sauce to be a replacement.
And I find it somewhat of a shame because In my short time in game, I fond individual Houndeyes specifically, plesantly more challanging - they are obviously not a real threat, but their shorter fuse and more subtle charge up make it harder to react to them, and I think if Crowbar Collective opted to shift certain fights closer to how Halo approaches their enamy balancing, I think there would be way to make combat on the whole work nicely without changing anything else. Other than maybe HECU repositioning. But I am not at their introduction yet.