Developer: Criterion
Publisher: EA
Age Rating: 16+
Players: 1
Genre: First Person Shooter

Criterion, the developers responsible for bringing explosions to driving games with their Burnout series, have tried their hand at a creating a first person shooter. The result is the explosion filled, all out action, kill fest that is BLACK.

Xbox 360 Backward Compatibility WARNING: At the time of writing BLACK will not play on the Xbox 360, however when Microsoft release updated emulation software via Xbox Live in the near future, BLACK should then be compatible. So in the meantime I hope you kept your original Xbox and didn’t Ebay it or trade it in… 

Gameplay

*Spoiler*

Throughout BLACK you play a highly trained soldier named Keller. The story is told through live action video cut scenes, which take place with Keller being interrogated. The 8 missions you play through are flashbacks covering the previous four days, of Keller’s life. Your mission was to take out a terrorist group known as Seventh Wave and it’s leader, an American government black ops agent gone bad called Lennox , but was your mission cleared by the government? For all it’s show and talk the story is pretty non-descript, but your not here for the story, you’re here for the action, like all good action movies of the 80’s like Commando and Rambo.

*End of Spoiler*

Criterion’s main objective with BLACK was to take FPS’s back to their roots, which means that you simply kill everything that moves, whilst progressing from the start to finish of the level. There’s no puzzles of any kind, to open doors you blow them off with your shotgun and there is defiantly no bullet time. BLACK is defiantly an arcade shooter (least for the first two difficulty settings) with the emphasis firmly on fun, shooting and blowing shit up.

But BLACK is by no means a retro shooter, Criterion have gone to town on the gun models and making them fun to fire, the first thing you will notice as you fire off bullets are the physics for the bullets and the way they cause damage to the environments. Destroying the cover enemies are hiding behind (which works both ways, so watch what you’re hiding behind) is hilariously fun, but that’s not the limit of the destruction you can cause. Something seems to be blowing up every 30 seconds or so, totally destroying everything surrounding it, including enemies, and the debris and smoke caused by the carnage fills the air so realistic, that the atmosphere created feels totally believable and you become immersed completely in the world (although there are a few inconsistencies to what gets destroyed).

The AI is pretty much cannon fodder, just have to be weary of a few that carry shields and have full body armour. This is slight gripe and not really a problem but enemies can take a lot of punishment before they go down, so either the body armour is too powerful or the weapons power is too weak (headshots do take them down in one though). One finally thought on enemy AI, why do RPG men explode when you kill them? Answers on a postcard…

Some levels you get team mates, they don’t really do much and you don’t have to worry about giving them commands, they just follow you and shoot stuff (Criterion keeping things simple).

Talking of weapons you can only carry two at a time, which I found odd considering this is an all-out arcade shooter that just wants you to shoot stuff, where’s my bottomless pocket? You’ll get to use all the usual stuff found in FPS’s armouries, such as shotguns, sniper rifles, pistols and the like. In some levels you’ll find silencers that can equipped to some of the guns, which allows you to take a more stealthy approach to tackling the missions. You can also select the firing mode for the majority of guns between single shot, burst fire and full auto, which is actually very useful as the rifles are more accurate on single shot and on burst mode you can conserve ammo. Each weapon has different characteristics, and some are therefore more suited to certain situations then others.   

The levels themselves are very well designed and laid out, but a little uninspiring at times, most are urban based, but you do get to spend some time in the woods.

I can safely say a health system hasn’t been implemented this well since HALO. You pick up first aid kits off some of the enemies you’ve killed, which instantly ups your health and you’ll also find health packs around the environments, which you can store 3 of (on the first two difficulties at least). Keller can take quite a bit of pain, but up the difficulty a bit and more thought is required to survive.

Luckily there are a few checkpoints dotted throughout the missions, but they are quite far apart. However the checkpoints aren’t save points and you’ll have to complete the mission for your progress to be saved, which is a slight draw back in some of the longer levels.

Controls

The controls a very intuitive, but I’m now so use to the Xbox 360 pad that it took me awhile to get use to the larger, wired controller s. As with nearly every FPS on the Xbox, the right trigger is fire and the left trigger is to throw grenades. Moving and aiming are taken care of via the left and right analogue sticks respectively; clicking in the left analogue stick makes Keller crouch and clicking in the right allows you to aim/zoom.

Y toggles suppressors on and off weapons (when available), B is melee, A is to reload and X is to pick up weapons. The D-pad is used extensively; up is to change firing mode, down is to use health packs and left and right allows you to change weapons. There are other preset layouts to choose from, and you can even totally customise the control configuration.

I think the controls are excellent and aiming is so easy, but it’s a shame you can’t lean. When playing on harder difficulties it would have been advantageous to have been able to lean out from cover and around doorways, but Criterion set out to strip FPS’s back to the basics and by dropping the ability to lean they haven’t had to over complicate the controls, so fair enough.

Graphics

In short; OMG! Criterion have really pushed your old trusty Xbox to it’s limits and beyond, just when you thought the Xbox had nothing left to show after Half Life 2, BLACK comes along and blows you away.

This is a masterpiece, with graphical effects that will make your jaw drop. The lighting is even better than in Splinter Cell and that’s saying something. It filters so realistically through windows, tree tops and holes in the wall that you’ll have to check that you haven’t taken your eyes off your TV and are looking out your window. Oddly though lighting sources can be destroyed, but the light remains… so put a stop to any of those stealth tactic thoughts you had going through your head, it isn’t going to happen.

Not only are the lighting effects the best the Xbox has to offer in my humble opinion, but the particle effects are to. At some point you’ll have to take your finger off the trigger (and that’s fact), as the scene in front of you will be so clouded by dust, smoke and debris (caused be explosions and gun fire) that you won’t be able to see what your shooting at.

Now BLACK’s party piece is it’s explosions, again these are no doubt the best the Xbox can muster, they are gorgeous, shooting skyward, lighting up the surroundings, beautiful to watch.

As if BLACK needed anything else to shout about in the graphics department, it goes and delivers the most realistically modelled guns. However this is also a bit of a draw back as well, Criterion are so proud of their gun models that they want to show them off at every possible opportunity, fair enough sticking them on the menu screens, that’s quite cool. But during gameplay they go a bit OTT trying to show them to you, when you reload the background gets blurred out, making you focus on the gun model. Not only does this really start to get annoying after about 5 minutes, it induced motion sickness for me.

In the demo that came with the Official Xbox Magazine issue 53, none of the blurry reload sequences were present, so this is obviously a tacked on after thought, one BLACK could have done without.

Finally the character models, they are pretty good and reasonably animated, but not as polished as the Half-Life 2 character models, but they do the job.

With all this going on you would think the Xbox would struggle, but the frame rate is solid throughout and loading times are minimal and only happen at the start of levels.

Sound

The music score is fittingly dramatic, and crops up just at the right moment to intensify the action (as if it needed it). The rest of the time you’re left with atmospheric sounds of the environments, which are truly believable.

Sound effects are possibly the best I have heard in any game, with shell casings hitting the floor, bullets impacting on surfaces and the gun sounds all sounding so realistic. Oh yeah and the explosions… the sound every bit as good as they look, crank up the 5.1 and the let the bass rip your house apart.

However it’s not all good in the sound department, the radio chatter is awful, absolutely dire, it sounds like Keller is shouting down a megaphone into his radio. It sounds so hollow and echoes so bad that it’s laughable, other characters on the radio don’t seem so bad, but are still pretty terrible. Also the voice overs/actors in the live action video clips just grate on the ears, with them trying to be overly gruff and tough.

Longevity

Well I romped through the 8 levels on Normal difficulty in 4 and half hours… so it’s not all that long. However there are a lot of secondary objectives on each mission to do, these range from blowing stuff up, to finding Intel. So nothing to serious, but still adds a bit to the life span to the game.

There’s also the Hard and Black Ops difficulty to unlock and play through and these will test your abilities, with restricted health and more objectives to complete.

Multiplayer… there isn’t any, a missed opportunity. But we all knew that BLACK wasn’t going to have multiplayer right from the start and Criterion made it very clear they wanted to focus on the single player side of things. So that doesn’t affect the score overall because they never set out to do it in the first place, but it would have been nice all the same. Always next time and there will be a next time as they left the ending wide open (providing sales are good I guess), then Criterion can add in the multiplayer and live support that this game would no doubt excel with.

Overall

Well what can you say, BLACK is what gaming is all about; it’s fun, carefree and crates a virtual world for you to immerse your self in. It’s every guys dream to run around with big loud guns, shooting the shit out of everything, making stuff blow up and having fun whilst doing it.

However Criterion sacrificed depth of gameplay, for simple run and gun fun and the action can’t hold up for ever, there’s only so many times something blowing up can remain fresh. I think Criterion realised this and that’s why the kept the game short and sweet. It stops just at the right point, leaving you wanting more, but being full… if you see what I mean. Remember too much of a good thing… you know the saying.

The only real problem with BLACK is the blurry reload sequences, which induce motion sickness and a few inconsistencies in the game world. Other than that there is nothing stopping me recommending that you buy BLACK.