I played through the entire Black Mesa Military mod about half a month ago, and I put off making a review due to the amount of things I wanted to say and procrastination. I want to emphasize that this is a fantastic mod for Black Mesa, it's nothing groundbreaking or the like, but it's very enjoyable. I'd recommend this mod to anyone who wants to spend a good couple of hours playing a very well experience, since for me the installation was quite simple so it's easy to get your hands on.

It's important to note that this mod is a couple of hours, in my case I think I spend around 6-10 hours on the mod, granted I was taking my time to document what I was experiencing so it's probably two hours shorter for most. Still, for a free mod based on the Black Mesa workshop it's quite long and in depth. There can be the argument that it went on too long, but I'll get into it later.

I want to list the pros first:

• The mod's soundtrack is phenomenal, whoever worked on the remixes and original tracks did an amazing job. I only wish the tracks continued playing when loading a save, as it's too tiresome to backtrack to an autosave in this mod rather than just using your own quicksaves which unfortunately break the tracks.
  
  
• The new weaponry that was added definitely added to the experience. When I found the Deagle, I was really impressed with how it felt, although not 1:1 with opposing force (holding 6 bullets instead of 7) it definitely was a nice throwback. Same could be said with the Sniper, which was extremely powerful. I do want to note that the sniper ammunition was just crossbow bolts though, despite obviously not being a crossbow and preforming different than the crossbow so it clearly wasn't a reskin.
  
  
• Combat was overall solid, at no points did I think what I was fighting against was unfair or too easy. The blend was pretty reminiscent of Black Mesa which is good.
  
  
• Highlights of the mod were the intro sequence, the Gargantua fight, and the all out battles between the HECU and Xen creatures in the latter half.

Overall a very solid experience, and met the core criteria of what a expansion mod should look like, however I found myself experiencing multiple issues during the actual gameplay of the mod.

One of the most memorable issues while playing the mod is the voice acting. It's not terrible, but it's not great either not just because of the quality of the actor. The main problem is that it's barely utilized in the mod, so anytime it appears it's quite jarring. At the start of the mod, you are given a tip to interact with some HECU guarding locations to hear their dialogue (which is completely uninteresting and filler btw). From there you would expect that the NPCs you find later in the mod would have said interactions, but that isn't the case. Whenever I did hear voice acting, I almost wished it hadn't been there or kept to a minimum. The game is also missing subtitles at a certain section of the mod near the midway point.

That leads me onto the characters/story. For all intents and purposes, there might as well not be a story. To summarize from what I understand: the main character (whom I don't remember the name of because it wasn't important and barely used) is an HECU marine who was deployed in Black Mesa with his squad to clean up Black Mesa. Things go wrong a lot, he gets injured, lobotomized and separated multiple times and has to try and fight his way out. Now this is all well and good, but the execution is really flawed. At no point are you given a reason to care for this person or his squad, in fact you get separated so often from your squad that I often forgot about it them. When you do find your squad mates, it's never even addressed that all of you have been separated for like three chapters of the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ story. Also all of them are generic marines with no character motivation, no personality and again bad voice acting. The player character is the same, I do not care about him in the same vain as Adrian Shepard because it never feels like you can make choices of your own in the game, and in fact it feels like you're only doing what the devs force you to do kind of like HL2.

This goes onto the AI of the game as well. First of all the friendly AI sucks, it often gets stuck, stops following you, blocks your way, and can't progress through certain points of the game. Now the latter issue is the same as Black Mesa, but at least there they often communicate they are going to be staying in an area due to a scripted sequence, but this doesn't happen. No unique voice lines, hell they don't react to you shooting and killing them. I kind of wish there wasn't friendly HECU that follow you since it's suck a letdown.

There's not really any puzzles or pacing breaks between combat, which is fine because the mod doesn't advertise itself more than a combat setpiece. Still, some breaks would be appreciated and puzzles that are more complex than flipping a lever.

It's also really disappointing that the Black Mesa staff barely react to you or your decisions in the story either. Whenever I was able to, I ended up sparing scientists and guards which was very few times. Probably because the devs didn't think that you would or to account for it, they never react further in the story, or at least to you not having hostile intentions. It's fine I suppose, but again just a letdown especially since most guards are too stupid to shoot you, or incase of a different one, just are completely broken and can be ordered to follow you like you're Gordon Freeman or Adrian.

One inconsistency that was apparent while playing is that the Black Ops appear way earlier in the story than they do in the canon of Half Life. Canonically, the Black Ops appear right after Forget About Freeman or around the same time period, since logically this is when the HECU was supposed to be removed from the scene and the clean up crew was brought in. However in this mod they appear SO much sooner, way before Questionable Ethics. And the worst part is that this is never addressed by a SINGLE HECU soldier despite them actively being in combat with one another. Like haha yeah guys don't bother reporting in that your own government is killing you lets ♥♥♥♥♥♥' kill Freeman.

There's also a ton of other issues I had with the mod such as NVGs breaking when going under water, broken lighting, floating objects and claymores, bad visuals in later chapters (especially in regards to map design), friendly AI dying to a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ kill barrier in Questionable Ethics despite you literally getting tons of them that are supposed to follow you into the Freeman Fight, overlapping props and chargers, broken map transitions, clipping issues into walls, weapons mysteriously disappearing out of your hands, and much much more. Everything I listed by the way I took a screenshot of, there's a lot more that I didn't and I just forgot about.

This mod has a lot of issues. I personally don't think it overrides the fact that this is still a good and fun mod to play through, that however doesn't mean that I think it should've been pushed out as is, even after fixes that it's had. I think there needed to be more bug fixing and playtesting by the mod developers before releasing Black Mesa Military, I'm sure it was worse prior to the recent patch that changed a lot of the maps.

I do think though as one of the first expansion-length experiences posted onto the Black Mesa workshop, it is serviceable and a good basis for what future mods should try to achieve. I think the devs that worked on this project have a lot of passion and skill when it comes to developing mods on Black Mesa and source in general, so I'm very interested to see what will come from them in the future! Overall, 7/10 mod that has great gameplay and a good soundtrack, but is lackluster in the story and quality department.