Ways in which new Xen is faithful to the original
It's a chore
The textures are way uglier
Most sane players just quit after reaching the lambda team

Ways in which xen outdoes it's original
It's terribly optimised
It's full of moments where you have to wait for setpieces

10/10 it looks interesting but sucks to play, really takes me back to '98

Funny, I just reached Xen in the game and I was about to post how awesome I think it is. I can't imagine the amount of work that went into making this game. So far, Xen is mostly jumping puzzles, but I am OK with that. The atmosphere really makes it seem more like an alien world than the originals where I felt like Xen was a "Platform World". Kudos!

I thought zen in BMS was good. Now og half life is where zen sucked

Both Xen sucks, but you gotta endure black mesa's Xen longer so.....

i liked the original xen, interested to reach the new one. just started playing, in office complex.

Originally posted by nordmeyerx:

Funny, I just reached Xen in the game and I was about to post how awesome I think it is. I can't imagine the amount of work that went into making this game. So far, Xen is mostly jumping puzzles, but I am OK with that. The atmosphere really makes it seem more like an alien world than the originals where I felt like Xen was a "Platform World". Kudos!

Oh yeah, xen is really cool the first few times, but it loses much more replay value than the bmrf. Which is true of the original xen tbh, novel and cool at first, but the gameplay is more tedious and the graphics are uglier.
There are some textures in bm xen that look like they're straight out of fallout 3, and these are textures you are meant to go right up to in order to progress. The art design is "cool" but only because they overdo the visual flair and it lacks a unique or cohesive style.
Gameplay-wise I feel xen got hit by feature/expectation creep but the devs just kept making more more more rather than better better better. The "puzzles are mostly just following a line to the relevant interactable which is very tedious to replay. The combat is poorly balanced so the devs shower you with health armour and resupplies to account for oversised combat encounters.

The fact that bms was free with no xen meant you were effectively paying to preorder xen, they made it too long because otherwise people would feel ripped off.

There's barely any combat at all in Xen, and what little is there is either fought with infinite supply pods, or the silly infinite uranium energy weapons. Vanilla Xen barely qualifies as an FPS experience, and if it wasn't so impossible to mod it, it'd have been improved ages ago.

Vanilla Xen, the jungle/swamp in particular, is extremely lifeless to me, and I can think of a dozen ways to make it feel more lived in and alive, but - again - very difficult to mod.

The Half-Life Xen ain't bad when first time playing.
Xen: it's over before you realized it's boring.

Gonarch's Lair: fun boss fight that's more interesting and challenging than the nihilanth, but gets boring after several times playing because it's basically a left-click simulator against a meatbag with enormous Health, point your crosshair at the boss, keep firing until the next script kicks in. Throw in some baby/regular headcrabs to spice things up...

Interloper: the first part was basically Xen chapter:Part 2 with more enemies. Second part is nice to see the rarely seen enemies again (tentacle, garg) with no jumping or puzzles on a simple map. Third area (factory) was fun seeing the slaves, grunts and controllers fighting in the same room because I like the Half-Life lore and seeing these aliens together was nice although I understand it's annoying for people who doesn't like them.

Nihilanth/Endgame: not the best conclusion chapters for a game. Getting caught in final boss's green orb sucks because going through those side rooms was tedious but like other games, you just gotta keep running around until you figured out what to do, which in this case, destroy the crystals and kill the brain. Not that hard so you can quickly end it before it gets boring.

Black Mesa's Xen however, was really bad. I remember doing the same stuffs in different areas on the same chapter: walk through the alien trees, follow the red wire and shoot its weakpoint to make it blue, go through 2 sea monsters, go through explosive mushrooms, look for a crystal key and put it in the machine. I quit at the fourth pool area with the sea monsters.

After two days in Xen, I am redacting my original assessment. It's wearisome.

The only problem of Black Mesa's Xen is that Interloper drags for too long, throwing a wrench into a game with decent pacing. Other than that I couldn't disagree more with every one of your points about this version of Xen.

I have mixed feelings towards this, but I somewhat agree with OP.

On the bright side: Visually, Xen is stunningly beautiful. The very final fight is pretty cool, escaping the Gargantuas' Lair was thrilling, and I enjoyed going for the Pacifist achievement (no killing Vortigaunts).

However, gameplay-wise, it becomes tedious, slowly but surely. Puzzles get repetitive and the concepts overstay its welcome (Not a fan of plugging plugs 10 times in a row, sorry). There's also the chance of softlocking yourself at some points if you try to rush some plugs puzzles (Plug sockets can get blocked with no plug connected on them, and there's no way of reverting it... hope you quicksave often). Finally, Big Momma's chase and fight (or whatever it is officially called) was pretty meh.

So to me, this modern Xen isn't terrible, BUT it does overstay its welcome ever so slightly. If it had half the puzzles it currently has, it'd be a pretty solid segment.

Exactly how I feel, very visually engaging but the good "moments" are too few and far between and the filler is very repetative. Compare the number of unique obstacles and solutions in a similar length of gameplay on earth and the problem becomes obvious.

This appears to be an static opinion about Xen.
I've read it since whole Xen got released, especially regarding Interloper.

I enjoy all the alien maps over the original ones.

But taste differs...

Xen is like the Energizer Bunny. It keeps going... and going... and going....

Originally posted by nordmeyerx:

Xen is like the Energizer Bunny. It keeps going... and going... and going....

and going....