Black Mesa
Worth it · Shooter · 2020
Steam Deck PlayableThe verdict
BUY IT.
Worth it at $19.99, a BANGER if it drops to $18.79.
- Length
- 15.3h
- Value
- $1.31/hr
- Reviews
- 95% positive
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Minimum on the Steam store: 6 GB of memory, 2 GB Dedicated Video Card or Greater, 20 GB of storage. Runs on Windows, Linux.
Relive Half-Life.
What drives the score
How to read this
Every input gets a grade, S to D, read from the buyer's side. The score is multiplicative, so an input only counts as raising when it sits near the top of its own scale. Anything with real room left is holding the score back, because that room is the gap to 100. ▲ marks a lift, ▼ a drag or a dock, ? an input we do not have, • a fact this genre's score does not use. The exact weights stay secret.
The value story
May 2025 is where it bottomed out, at $1.99. It has been discounted 70 times in the 11 years tracked here, typically at 60 percent off, with about 7 weeks between sales. Today it is at full price. The last sale was about 13 weeks ago, and on this game's rhythm the next one tends to arrive within 7 weeks. It becomes a BANGER at $18.79, a level the record has reached 70 times.
On value it sits in the top 5 percent of its genre. It is pricier than 75 percent of its genre, and better reviewed than 95 percent. Among the games that feel like it, Half-Life 2 ($9.99, scores 97) beats it on value, while it beats Half-Life: Source ($9.99, scores 25).
The press gave it 84; the people who bought it give it 95 percent. An 11-point gap in the buyer's favour.
Steam's global achievement data says about 5 percent of players ever finish it. On a 15.3-hour game, that is a lot of paid-for hours most people never see. This site sampled 799 of its Steam-purchase reviews; 4 were written by buyers who refunded it, sampled from reviews written January 2026 to September 2026. Inside the two-hour refund window, 81 percent of the 6,241 reviews written there were positive, against 95 percent overall, and those are 5 percent of everything written about it.
6 years after release it still had 907 people in it at once.
The drop-off
61% start to 5% finishMost players never reach the end. On a 15.3-hour game, that's a lot you pay for and may never use. Steam global achievements
Players
907 players at peak in the last day.
The chart appears once this game has been counted more than once.Player counts via SteamSpy.
What players say
This is a very well done remake. Long ago I feel in love with the original Half-Life; In elementary school we all passed around burned copies (sorry Valve!) of Half-Life 1, and it was probably the first game I really got "into". Black Mesa lets you play through Half-Life 1 remade in Half-life 2: Ep2 (or beyond?) with modern Source Engine graphics and systems. It's pretty amazing they did such a good job keeping the...
A fantastic fan-made remake of Half-Life 1 that is imo even better than the original game. It modernizes a lot of elements and expands upon the level design in big ways, most of which I think are for the better.
This 20 y/o game is still good apart from me having slight adhd and a tendency of speedrunning
Player reviews from Steam: the most helpful all-time, plus the newest that clear the same quality bar, with the hours each player had put in when they wrote it. The mix of Recommended and Not recommended follows the game's Steam ratio. Rotates daily. Opinions are theirs.
Cite this score
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Black Mesa scores 84/100 on the BANG Score (worth it). The BANG Score rates what a game is worth for the money. Via Steam BANGERS. https://steambangers.com/game/362890/black-mesaThe BANG Score is one number for value, 0 to 100: price against how it reviews and how long it was built to be. It answers the money question and stops there; whether the game is for you is still your call.
Reviews set the ceiling and price moves you inside it, so a cheap game that reviews badly cannot climb. Ratings from few reviewers are shrunk toward the middle, so 100 percent from nine people does not outrank 96 percent from ninety thousand. Length comes from HowLongToBeat where it can be matched, measured against a per-genre floor so a five-hour narrative game is judged against other narrative games rather than against a sixty-hour RPG. Where no verified length exists the score says so and carries a dock, because the biggest input is then a guess. The full method, including where it is weak → Steam reviews as of Sep 12, price as of Sep 24.
A number here look wrong? Tell me what it got wrong and I will look at the inputs behind it.