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Black On paper, Black had so much potential: a technically spectacular, action-oriented first-person shooter developed by Criterion, makers of the exhilarating Burnout series. I bought it at full-price on its release day. It’s not something I usually do, but I wanted to play Black, right there, right then.
Nine days later, Black went back to the shop as a return. I had finished it, and wanted it out of my house as soon as possible. So what went wrong?
The current trend for first-person shooters is to set them in something approximating a gritty and realistic real world. In such games, bullets tend to cause near-fatal damage, and charging into situations guns blazing is almost always a bad idea. Black throws that all out of the window, and takes its cues not from Counter-Strike but from 1980s action movies. The best tactical primer you can review before playing this game is Schwarzenegger's Commando: walk in front of enemies, fire thousands of rounds from the hip, repeat. It's a liberating experience, and reminds you how tiresome "realistic" counter-terrorist games have become.
Naturally, given the focus on gunfire and destruction, Black’s guns, though based upon real-world weaponry, are larger-than-life. The supremely detailed weapon models are absurdly over-stylised: every bump, every indentation in their steel-plate stands out. Clip-sizes are exaggerated over their real-world counterparts, positively encouraging a strategy of spray-and-pray.
These firearms demand your attention every time they're on screen. When you reload, only your gun remains in focus as you concentrate on it. Slap the magazine home, and the world drops into focus again, a lovely, unique touch. Far more than "Jack Keller", the identikit, gruff, renegade Black-Ops soldier you play, these guns are the real protagonists of the game. They don't just look good, either; they sound stunning, each filling the room with its distinctive report. Let off a burst of AK-47 fire in one of the game's smaller rooms, and the reverb is deafening.
And the feedback from firing the guns is staggering. It's here that the Burnout influence is most obvious - bullet impacts erupt in shower of sparks and plasterwork. A full clip of Uzi-fire disintegrates masonry in a cloud of rubble, plaster, sparks, and noise. The effect, coupled with force-feedback and those remarkable sound-effects, makes the destruction on offer truly tangible. And when you're on the receiving end of it, you flinch.
This solidity runs throughout the game; the guns feel solid, the steel, bricks and mortar the game is built out of feel solid. And then, on top of that, come the explosions. These aren't just 2D sprites slapped under some lighting effects; they're seismic, earth-shaking events. Early on in the game, a solider holed-up in a tower block fires a rocket-propelled grenade at you. "RPG, RPG!" chant your colleagues, and in true Black Hawk Down fashion, you see a tin can flying towards you, trailing a beautiful volumetric stream of smoke. You duck out of the way, the explosion shaking the ground by you, and you grab your own RPG and fire back. Your round enters the enemy's window...
...and the whole floor of the skyscraper explodes. As the windows blow out, for a split second, you're in Die Hard. All the explosions are like this; the moment your sight (a tiny pixel in the middle of the screen) turns black, it indicates potential destruction. Cars and fuel tanks seem the most obvious targets; later, in the Foundry stage, when you realise the giant gas reservoirs are targets, you can't help but pump bullets into them. The mushrooming explosion that follows, whiting out the screen as your retinas temporarily burn, is reward enough.
But all these points - the graphics, the sound, the "feel", are all mechanical. When you realise that the game is attached to these mechanics it all falls apart. The narrative seems to think it's innovative - a tale of eastern-European terrorists, double-cross and betrayal told as flashback during an interrogation. In reality, the 24 influence is very obvious. The cutscenes are live-action - shot with a stomach-churningly jerky camera and all manner of tinted lighting. It doesn't feel innovative or subversive at all; it feels like the golden age of CD-ROM entertainment again.
And the story only exists in the cut-scenes. When you drop into the game, all you have to do is charge through a level, guns blazing, until the end. The fact that there's no "jump" feature should suggest just how linear the game is. It's a rollercoaster ride - and I've played many rollercoaster-ride-games - but it never quite signals where you should be going next well enough. At one point, your teammate tells you to "hold position". So you do. You can hold position for thirty minutes if you want, shooting respawning enemies. What you're meant to do is remember that, as a "loose cannon", the last thing you'd do is obey orders... so you don't hold position, you charge into the open door... and the level suddenly ends. The pacing of levels is dreadful - they veer from fabulously exciting shoot-outs to dull corridor-trawls. Just when things are hotting up, the level ends. Just when they're slowing down, there's still a mile to go. It's very haphazard.
The "thousands of bullets" approach is fun, but given that even the most menial enemies take well over ten M16 rounds to drop - and many more bullets from the weedy machine-guns - it gets quite repetitive. Every time you get given a silencer, a stealthy approach only lasts a minute or two before the gun-porn starts again. Black is an exhausting experience. Sometimes, that exhaustion is truly exhilirating - surviving a colossal gunfight on a dilapidated housing estate or blowing holes through pasteboard walls in a run-down asylum. But sometimes, it's not just tiring, it's tiresome: watching another horde of enemies spawn right in front of you, ploughing round after round into generic soldiers, running down yet another grey, brown, or black corridor.
And it's short. It's very short. Five or six hours should see anyone polish off normal difficulty. And all that then remains is to go back at a higher difficulty level, through the same old levels. No real bonuses bar a few new weapons. And the kicker is that the end is so sudden. I'm all for short games, but this doesn't feel like a short one - it feels like a truncated one.
This is a review of two halves. The technical mastery on show deserves superlatives - impressive on XBox, remarkable on PS2, Black looks practically "next-gen". But bolted on top of it is a game that wouldn't have passed muster on the N64 or PSone. Five out of five for technical achievement, then; one out of five for the game itself. Add them together, and you'll arrive at six out of ten.
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