Black Mesa: Blue Shift releases its fourth chapter

Barney's solo adventure continues.

Barney's solo adventure continues.

Half-Life: Blue Shift was a 2001 spin-off developed by Gearbox that put players into the regulation boots of Barney Calhoun, a security guard at the Black Mesa Research Facility and friend of Gordon Freeman. Following the original Half-Life’s modder-made remake as Black Mesa, another group of modders set to work remaking Blue Shift using Black Mesa’s resources.

The HECU Collective has been releasing Black Mesa: Blue Shift chapter by chapter, and just put out Chapter 4: Captive Freight, which you can see in the profesh-looking trailer above. A whole lot of things go boom. With this complete, there are only four more chapters of Blue Shift left to go. 

Captive Freight is the largest chapter of Blue Shift to be remade so far, and its release is accompanied by improvements for the previous chapters including bug fixes, balance tweaks (the crowbar’s slower but hits harder, while the vortigaunts’ grenade trajectory has been altered), and improvements to performance, AI navigation, audio, visual guidance, models, animations, and textures, among other things. 

You can download Black Mesa: Blue Shift from Black Mesa’s Steam Workshop, as well as its ModDB page. It’s currently in the running for ModDB’s Mod of the Year 2022, alongside other popular mods like S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Anomaly, Mental Omega, Unification and Ultimate Apocalypse for Dawn of War: Soulstorm, and Kingdoms of Arda, a Middle-earth total conversion for Mount and Blade 2: Bannerlord. You can cast your vote at ModDB.

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