Upon loading up Black the player is left in little doubt as to what the game is all about. Beautifully rendered guns adorn the menu screen and fire off in slow motion, innuendo definitely intended, this is about as close to gun porn as you can get. Even in game the weapons are still impressive to this day - pixel for pixel they might not have modern games beat but the lighting and detail on each is astonishing. Without satisfying game play the fancy hardware on display would be worth nought. So it delights me to say that Black delivers, well for the most part. Much was made of the destructible environments before the games release but the enthusiasm surrounding this particular aspect of the game seems laughable now in the face of current shooters. There’s no real physics in play as you tear the scenery to pieces with walls breaking apart along predetermined weak points and huge explosions damaging objects the same way and style pretty much every time. The debris and dust particles that fly through the air as you spew bullets are enough to fill the screen at times. Peering through the smoke to pick out enemies visible only by the flash of their guns, it’s clear that the destructibility of real world objects was simply an aid to atmosphere. Only in one level did I notice the destruction seriously adding to tactical options as I blasted through plasterboard walls to advance instead of using the enemy filled corridor. Repeat play does expose the levels to be completely linear but they’re so intelligently designed it’s forgivable to think you’re forging your own path at times. At one point, early in the game, I made my way through a dense forest, never getting lost or having to turn back from a dead end in spite of the myriad of different routes supposedly on offer.
Eventually I found myself atop a hill blessed with a secret RPG weapons stash. As I reigned death and destruction onto the bridge ahead of me I felt as though it were almost an accident that I’d stumbled upon the weapons, level design at it’s finest, fooling the player into believing they have more say than they do in the way they approach such simple options. This isn’t a title that will take you long complete, though ironically due to the inability to save at checkpoints it is a game you’ll need to dedicate hours at a time to. If you exit the game before you complete any of the games lengthy levels you’re progress is simply discarded, meaning you have to start the whole level again when you return.
In all honesty the checkpoints aren’t something that will concern most shooter fans. The game locks you out of the hardest difficulty levels until you’ve completed the game first, a fairly glaring error when at the normal and easy settings Black is quite simply a walkover.
For reference, I’m challenged by most shooters on their default difficulty level. By the time the credits rolled I’d finished the game in just under 5 hours and had yet to experience the cold embrace of death. That’s not to say I never felt under pressure. The game does a fairly admirable job of keeping the adrenaline pumping and the threat of failure is always looming, the shotgun touting and RPG wielding goons alone do enough to raise the heartbeat. Black was originally penned as a trilogy but Criterion has confirmed they aren’t working on, or planning, a sequel. The obvious answer as to why they’ve abandoned such plans is that releasing a game in the FPS genre during the emergence of the 360 and the downfall of the Xbox wasn’t such a wise idea.
Perhaps though the team were simply disillusioned by their forays into the shooter market, or maybe the ’evil corporate suits’ at Electronic Arts demanded nothing but Burnout for all eternity. Though Alex Ward, creative director at Criterion, claims that plans for a trilogy were abandoned simply because the team didn’t feel they could offer anything new to the genre after Black. Whatever the reasons it’s a crying shame we won’t see a Black 2. I can live without a resolution to the interesting but under developed story line but I’m itching to see what Criterion could do on the current generation of consoles given how good Black looked on even the PS2.
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Aug 29, 2010 10:30:40 (
Aug 29, 2010 09:30
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