Posted by Fragimus_Max

Pros: Cryo-Chamber spawnroom was very pleasing to the eye, as was most of the map's aesthetic design. The raid alarm is great. Shows much potential by what seems to be a first-time TF2 mapper.

Cons: The centerpiece of the map caused horrible lag on both the servers I played it on. FPS dropped substantially, and my summation is that it's because the game is forced to render too much at once due to the lack of walls. This also poses another problem; playing this map is walking into a potential Sniper-fest... almost to the point that, if someone doesn't want to suck it up and go head-to-head with lil' Jimmy who's at 540 points and about to breach the 6 hour mark - the team will have an extremely hard time even making it to the middle of that humongous room. It was so big, two Uber attempts didn't even last long enough to get to the other side.

Improvements: The rest of the map ran well with only occasional lag, and I think redesigning the middle area as rooms with an intricate series of catwalks and ramps would improve it's rendering speed. I liked the ventilation system, but there's more that can be done with it - and the air lift is raw and needs to be replaced with something better. Also, make sure you're converting the majority of your brushwork into func_detail and I would bombard the map with Hint/Skips.

Notes: Overall, I'm very impressed with what Dragonhill has done with Black Mesa. Although it doesn't seem to duplicate any memorable details form the original HL besides it's name (which could also be due to my fading memory of the last decade), I can accept that it -is- part of Black Mesa, and I hope that we see more maps from the author that expand upon this concept.