After many years of waiting, Half-Life fans can rejoice as Black Mesa has been released. Black Mesa is a mod for Valve’s Source Engine, which aims to recreate the original Half-Life with better graphics, physics, and more.

Black Mesa reintroduces the player as Doctor Gordon Freeman, along with the original cast of memorable characters and environments seen in Half-Life. Black Mesa was created on the basis that Half-Life: Source didn’t fully live up to the potential of a Source engine port of Half-Life, created by Valve, in terms of art detail, level sizes, and code features. Built from the ground up, Black Mesa utilizes the source engine to create a polished version of Half Life with new models, maps, soundtrack, voice acting, and textures which all fans of Half-Life will love.

For those familiar with the original Half-Life will notice that the Xen epilogue levels aren’t included in the first release of Black Mesa. This is because the team are still working on their own interpretation of the Zen levels. The reason for this is that the team are redesigning the Xen levels as the levels in the original game were panned by almost everyone for being nothing more than repetitive platforming levels, and the team behind Black Mesa are going to remake the entire Xen segments – giving them a larger part in the story of the game.

Black Mesa is available to download from the official website. All you require to play is a Steam account, and a game which uses the source engine – such as Team Fortress 2, which is now free to play. The game will also be available on the brand new platform titled ‘Steam Greenlight’, so it will soon be available on the Steam Store too.

Are you a die-hard Half-Life fan? Or new to the franchise? Regardless, let us know what you think of Black Mesa in the comments, we’d love to hear what you think.