Black

If you want tension and action then BLACK is probably a good bet to get your fill.

BLACK can be one intense first-person shooter experience. And aside from some overly ambitious cutscenes that grind the action to a halt at intervals, the game never loosens the screws on the tension. Nice looking and simply fun to play, BLACK nonetheless has some small problems that keep it from being all it could be.

Developed by Criterion, BLACK attempts to do for the first-person shooter what its Burnout series has done for the racing genre – ramp the destruction level to stratospheric heights. You wouldn’t think that first-person shooters would need more destruction, but there you’d be wrong. Most FPS games are all about body count. Not to say BLACK doesn’t have a high body count, but what makes it different from most shooters is the level of destruction that you can wreck on the environment. Almost everything reacts in some way to the gunfire: walls show pock marks, boxes disintegrate and anything even remotely capable of exploding will.

The reason you’re doing all this shooting is because you are a black-operations soldier hunting down terrorists. The game is told as a series of flashbacks that recount a four-day period where everything did not go quite as it should have for Sergeant Keller (your personae) and his team. Now Keller’s butt is in a crack as he is being debriefed in a dim room by a rather unpleasant man while wearing shackles. The story takes place in some post-breakup-Yugoslavianesque country with lots of terrorists with Slavic accents. The story quickly becomes superfluous to the game though. You’re here to blow the hell out of terrorists and that is all you really need to know.

What follows is a series of missions that start out good and just never really change. There is no genuine effort at sneaking about here (though you can put a silencer on some of the weapons), each level is all about getting through the level and killing anything that stands between you and your objective. Primary objectives are the ones that move you through it: cross a bridge, find stairs down, cross the border. Other objectives are gravy. They consist of destroying blackmail evidence that could embarrass the USA or compromise security, intelligence collection to use against the enemy, and destruction of enemy equipment to cripple their efforts.

The level design is mostly okay, if not really brilliantly inspired. You have a hard time getting lost. Even if there is more than one path to take, you can choose either and will ultimately get where you need to end up. Environments range from large outdoor levels to crawls through decaying buildings with close quarters fighting.

What perturbed me about the levels was the way the game often herded the player down a set path like a cattle squeeze chute. There were places that a child of three could have stepped over or jumped across that I had to find another way around. I appreciate my FPS games being free of platforming elements, but no jump at all – or even the ability to step up high – was ludicrous.

If you’ve been reading the hype, you’ll know that BLACK is unapologetically about guns and using them liberally. Therefore I was a little surprised that the game did not model the use of the weapons better. I hate to break it to players, but an M-16 assault rifle does not have a 95 round clip. Its clip is only about 30 rounds. Most of the weapons were equally overloaded. Criterion said that the game was supposed to play like a 1980s action film – films where the hero regularly got hundreds of rounds from a weapon before needing to reload, and then only when a plot complication was needed. If they were trying to replicate that, they should have just made ammunition unlimited and you could shoot all day if you wanted to. Also, with a few exceptions like explosive projectiles launchers, sniper rifles and shotguns, all the weapons feel pretty generic. An M249 machinegun does not seem to take down an enemy appreciably better than a MP5 9mm submachine gun.

One aspect of the weapons that was nicely modelled: the muzzle climb that takes place when a gun is fired in full-automatic mode. Here the rounds dutifully struck higher as the gun fired the next bullet in a series, taking your sights off target and making the art of the controlled burst a necessary talent to learn when shooting things at a distance.

On the subject of taking down enemies, you’ll take down plenty of them. To paraphrase an old joke, God must love terrorist because he sure made a lot of them. By the end of the game you will have literally killed thousands of them. That is not to say that you’re just going to mow right through these guys though. Your enemies are armored and it generally takes a lot of shots to bring them down, unless you can manage a head shot. The big problem is the enemy never really gets any better as the game goes on. They are in some ways intelligent and will take cover when you fire at them, but then they break cover like some village idiot. They can also be absolutely oblivious to their surroundings, allowing you to just walk up to a couple of guys and kill them on the spot. Helen Keller would make a better sentry.

One place BLACK excels is in the simplicity of its menu system. It is so very easy to get into a game and play without wading through level upon level of choices. Of course the reason it can do this is that there is only one mode of play for BLACK: single-player campaign. You get a choice of difficulty settings, but beyond that there only one choice of how to play. Naturally you have to wonder how anyone can make an FPS game without some kind of multiplayer mode included so there is something to do once the game has been played to its conclusion, but Criterion apparently felt the single-player game stood well enough on its own. Another good side effect of the limited game play, the manual is one of the thinnest I have seen in years.

From a graphical point of view the game is beautiful whether you are playing it on the Xbox or PlayStation 2. There are few games in either console’s library that look better. Stuff comes apart realistically under the hail of bullets and the rag-doll effect as enemies fall from towers and catwalks is very satisfying. This is not to say there are not some small graphical anomalies. I saw one guy go down stuck halfway through a concrete road barrier: legs on one side, head and torso on the other. Dropped weapons also occasionally hung in mid-air. All small stuff, but it does make you pause in the midst of the chaos, which breaks the player out of the game world.

Audio rivals the visuals with a wide variety of gun sounds that all sound realistic. The explosions are full and reverberate in tight quarters like the inside of a factory. The musical score has eschewed the clichéd driving rock music found in so many games and instead features a soundtrack filled with orchestral music, giving the game a feel more like a movie. Voice acting is okay, but the majority of it is thoroughly disposable whether it is the in-game shouts of enemies or squad mates, or the intrusive cutscenes that fail to really involve you in any kind of meaningful story.

On a compatibility note: Xbox 360 gamers, you have once again been denied. The Xbox version of BLACK does not run on your shiny new system. Go back and play some more Call of Duty 2.

What ultimately hurts BLACK and keeps it from being a great game is the same thing that made the ‘80s action flicks it has been compared to fade away: both are rather one dimensional. Once you’ve played the first few levels of the game, you have really seen all the game has to offer. It keeps the tension high as you gun your way through the game, but the adrenaline begins to taste sour long before the game is finished. And with no multiplayer mode to take up the slack, this game will quickly find itself on the shelf collecting dust. Give it a B for a lot of shallow, pretty, noisy, guns-blazing fun.

This review courtesy of our friends at Gameshark .