The first half-life has aged noticeably: You can clearly see that the shooter, which is now over 20 years old, comes from an era before 4K resolution and ray tracing. If you want to experience the famous shooter again in a more modern form, you can now fall back on the remake Black Mesa.
The new edition developed by fans, however, could only be played with English dialogues so far. Now (other) fans have released a free mod for the fan remake that adds a full Europe soundtrack to the game. You could Download from the Steam Workshop.
We also tested Black Mesa at the time: You can read in the test whether the remake convinced us:
Black Mesa im Test
Does the Half-Life remake convince?
More than 4300 lines of dialogue set to music and all choreographies adapted. Lent the project overall 15 voice actors their voices. You can hear what the Europe dialogues sound like in the video from the developer:
Link to YouTube content
What is Black Mesa?
Black Mesa was developed by fans as a remake of the first Half-Life and released on Steam in March 2020. The game has also received several updates since its release, and the community has always added mods to it.
Black Mesa versus Half-Life – comparison pictures: See remake versus original
The remake reworks almost all aspects of the original Half-Life, but tries to stay true to the original. It does such a good job that even developers at Valve prefer the remake to the original. Among other things, Black Mesa offers players improved graphics and new visual effects, gameplay improvements such as a new enemy AI, a new soundtrack and even completely new levels in the alien world Xen. How significantly the remake and the original differ optically can be seen here in comparison:
The Xen levels in particular look beautiful in the remake thanks to modern technology – especially in comparison to the original, which is now quite significantly aged:
The alien world Xen has been redesigned the most thoroughly and looks really impressive.
If you don’t have the remake yet, now is a good time to grab it: Black Mesa is currently 75 percent off in the Steam winter sale and costs just under 4 dollars.
Updates already in progress
If you want to play Black Mesa in Europe, you can use the mod as described above via the Steam Workshop add to your game. Note, however, that the Europe Mod
around a Beta-Version acts. The Europe voice output still contains minor bugs, in addition, some content still needs to be supplemented.
For example, the volume of the dialogues is sometimes incorrect and the English dialogues are still used in multiplayer. Critical bugs are not known, however, and the developers are already working hard on the first updates and fixes for their mod. A complete list of all known bugs can be found at Steam, There is also Tipshow you can fix some bugs in the Steam Workshop version.
Black Mesa isn’t the only fan project of its size. Time and again, fans and hobby developers surprise players with gigantic mods for their favorite games. We present you the most ambitious projects:
more on the subject
The greatest mods of all time
What do you think of the new Europe dubbing? Is it a reason for you to play Black Mesa again or maybe even finally? How do you like the individual speakers? Feel free to write us your opinion in the comments!
