Black

Written by Adam Woolcott  on March 16, 2006

Review: The first FPS you'll need to hide under the bed.

Tweet

Comments

Through Burnout, we've learned that Criterion Games really likes destruction in their creations, especially when it's placed in the hands of the person playing the game. That's why Crash events exist, and why they finally let you bang traffic around in Burnout Revenge. They want you to cause the sort of destruction that would get you into trouble in reality, and make you look at their abilities when it comes to creating special effects and visuals. And this philosophy has spread to another famously American game genre Ц the first-person shooter. Dubbed as 'gun porn', Black is Criterion's tribute...not so much to the FPS genre, which has reached critical mass and oversaturation, but instead to the biggest players of every FPS Ц the weapons themselves. Black is all about the guns and the damage they can cause in the hands of people who know what they're doing. Sure, there's a basic storyline and all and all, but Black makes the player not care about it Ц they want you blowing stuff up, altering the environment, and demonstrating the true power (and danger) of a gun and what can happen when the trigger is pulled.

Black has some semblance of a plot; you play as a US Black Ops soldier, who is being interrogated by a superior questioning his actions in eastern Europe where a terror cell has emerged under the guidance of a former American agent who grew the cell from within the US. Black is a flashback game, as the cutscenes between the stages explains the events that play out when you gain control. Aside from these small scenes, the plot is a bare minimum, explaining the reason why you're playing but not much else. To Criterion's credit, getting right down to the business of shooting stuff is a wise idea; Black has never been touted in any other way. Black is a single player game only Ц there isn't any sort of multiplayer option whatsoever. It's a shame since there's a lot of potential for a unique take on the online FPS, but alas no version of the game contains even split screen action. There's always Black 2, I suppose.

Black is split into 8 levels, all of which have varying objectives depending on the difficulty level you choose when you begin the first stage. The basic Easy mode only asks you to complete the primary tasks and doesn't require any intelligence gathering or secondary objectives, which are things that need to be done on the default Normal difficulty. If you can finish the game on Normal you can unlock Black Ops, which makes you do and see everything to complete a level. Playing on Normal is suggested for one reason; if you are playing on Easy and finish a stage, you can't play through it again later on Normal unless you start from scratch, but if you finish on Normal, Easy also unlocks. Black Ops can't be selected unless you finish the entire game on Normal.

Ever since Black made its debut at E3 2004, much has been said about how guns will be the stars of the show and the game would employ a game engine that lets you shoot everything any anything to cause a whole bunch of destruction; the sort of talk that led to the game being touted as 'gun porn' because it was so sensationalized compared to reality. In general, this is definitely true. The wide selection of guns are ferocious and the amount of force feedback you'll feel is pretty nuts, giving the impression that indeed these are dangerous, deadly weapons that really can cause havoc in the right situations. The basic pistol might seem a little weak but get your hands on an AK-47 or a Spaz 12 shotgun, 2 very common weapons, and the difference is clear when you pull the trigger. The destruction caused by these weapons is pretty intense too, though definitely not as destructive as the hype would lead you to believe. The level designs mostly give you plenty to shoot at; oil barrels, cars, and the like, or when you have a rocket launcher it can be used to, ahem, make you a door for accessing a locked building.

But Black's physics and destruction engine has serious bang for the buck and potential for more powerful, dangerous action in the future. For instance, there will be numerous areas where enemies will be patrolling, with explosive barrels all around. Instead of shooting directly at the enemies and wasting bullets (even though bullets are all over the place), firing at the barrels can create a chain reaction and leave charred bodies all around. Other times you might see enemies on an overhead bridge with a jeep or other vehicle nearby; I think you know what to do. Though Black doesn't really employ a lot of strategy aside from 'kill everything' there's definitely moments where tactical thinking will help, such as equipping a suppressor on the pistol for stealth kills, or dealing with rocket launcher firing enemies by firing a rocket back and blowing up the building he's positioned in. It's this kind of action that gives Black its identity, and though there's not the kind of complete destruction that was once expected, it's still the kind of brutal shooter that does things no other FPS can.

But there are times when the game falls into a trap of being just another FPS. Right away, you enter a forest stage with patrols, but little to blow up, and mostly you progress through stealth kills or direct firing at enemies. Other stages are more direct in that you just will be firing at dozens of enemies spawning all over the place, some of which are easily taken out but others require more effort because they have lots of body armor. Though there's barrels and other objects to blow up, there's always going to be scattered survivors and then the guns once again take over, or you can use grenades to clear out places. The grenades are kinda funny because they expose some really bad AI flaws. As grenades are one hit kills usually, they're very useful clearing out tough enemies, but only because they don't really run far enough away and get killed 90% of the time. It's about as sure a kill as you'll get in the game unless it involves blowing stuff up. The enemies also seem to dumbly position themselves near explosive things, just begging for destruction. To make up for this, you'll find that basic enemies pretty much need half a clip to go down, and the armored ones need even more Ц even with direct headshots. And that's not even mentioning that there's usually 10 enemies at a time.

Because you do get into some wild firefights, damage will be taken. And because Black is designed to be 'real', there's no regenerating shields, recovering health by hiding, or anything like that...but instead you deal with medical kits. Which of course is just as real as regenerating shields. But I digress. Your health bar is surprisingly low, and a few real good shots can kill you fast, so relying on finding health kits and med packs is your only way to survive. Off dead enemies you'll get med packs that instantly recover health, but in the levels there's also health kits lying around that you stock up and use when your health is low. Not automatically mind you, but only when you use them manually. Which is great when you're in an intense battle or accidentally use one when it's not really needed. When you are near death, you will know it as the screen changes to reflect injury and you can hear heavy breathing & a heart beat (not to mention the vibrating controller)...so that's your cue to use one of the three possible health kits you've attained. Believe me, you'll need to use those health kits quite often, so be sure to find them and hope there's med packs dropped from dead terrorists around too.

All the talk of health and staying alive brings up perhaps Black's most fatal flaw Ц the severe lack of checkpoints and saving. All 8 levels are pretty lengthy, and only have 2 or 3 checkpoints at the most, and there's no way to save the game during a stage, only between levels. Chances are you'll end up repeating difficult parts of the game constantly, and generally losing 20 minutes at a time because there was no checkpoint to bail you out. It certainly makes every battle doubly intense since it's such a risky proposition to die, but from a gameplay standpoint, repeating stretches of a level again and again is tiresome. The irony is that even though all of Black's levels run 30 minutes or more to complete, the game can be finished in 4-5 hours...which you could gather by doing simple math right about now. It's surprisingly brief and seems to end when things are really getting good. Granted I can't see Black's admittedly paper-thin gameplay concept lasting 10 hours or more without getting very boring (as it can get repetitive after a while), but the 5 hours you do get is pretty enjoyable. Perhaps it's best to end things before that eventual boredom would have settled in. It all depends on your perspective when it comes to short games. However it does seem that Black artificially lengthens its playtime with the whole lack of checkpoints and saving thing.

Criterion is known for their mastery of game hardware and pumping out quality visuals and Black is no different; from a technical standpoint the game might even rival stuff on next-generation hardware. However while Burnout is known for colorful locales and special effects for car crashes, Black is gritty, run down, and bleak. The guns are incredibly detailed, and to further emphasize the 'guns are the stars' philosophy, they are huge and take up a larger screen space than you'd expect and you really do see the bullets fly out of the weapons. The explosions are brutal, with all the sorts of special effects that people come to demand from Criterion, so expect many big booms and firework shows when you blow up a huge oil refinery or using that rocket launcher to take out an already damaged building to make it even more damaged, possibly bringing it to the world of rubble. There's even a crazy reload effect where the screen blurs as you change clips, adding some reality in that it's difficult to focus on surroundings when you're trying to load your weapon. Enemies display plenty of their own physics when you shoot them; if they're perched on a bridge or catwalk, they usually will fall down off and plunge to the ground as they die. Explosions will send them flying across the screen; perhaps not as wildly as some games would, but realistically enough. Coming from the guys who made crashing cars cool, this isn't really a surprise.

The first thing you'll probably catch when you play Black for the first time is that the guns are loud. Really loud. Like you'd be deaf in reality loud. Firing an AK leads to a blistering track of bullets flying and hitting objects or people in the area, and when you connect with an explosive object, it results in a lovely sounding boom to counter the ping of stray bullets hitting a harmless target. Sometimes it's hard to not want to say 'holy crap!' even if you're all alone with nobody around to hear. There isn't a whole lot of musical accompaniment to Black; even the title screen contains no central theme. Sometimes you hear the same sort of generic war music that's been in about every other serious FPS since the genre was born, but it's not a frequent thing. Clearly Criterion wanted you to not only feel the guns, and not only see the results of firing the guns, but they really, really wanted you to hear the guns and nothing else short of the foreign tongue of terrorists as you infiltrate and kill them. Look at it this way Ц at least there's no EA Trax to mess things up. Because if there was any FPS that did sorta scream for a loud soundtrack, Black is it. But they didn't. Thankfully. The little bits of voice acting during cutscenes or in radio transmissions is fine too, but there's not a whole lot of it anyway.