Blacksite’s opening chapter takes the novel step of featuring very little in the way of aliens and conspiracy. Starting during the most recent Iraq conflict the player takes control of Aeran Pierce, a US solider leading a mission to destroy a cache of Weapons of Mass Destruction. Echoing real life, he and his team find none. Well, not the conventional kind at least. The Iraqis appear to have had a Close Encounter and before they can all shout “Anal probe!” the mission goes horribly wrong. Cut to three years later and an invading alien militia are attacking the US on its own soil. By no small coincidence part of the cavalry is Pierce who is reunited with his old squad to take down the bad guys and save the America day. Along with whatever other countries constitute the rest of the free world at the moment. Hoo-hah!

While there isn’t much in the way of plot, and what exists is stretched thin enough to have ripped open some pretty mighty plot holes, the game is laced with attempts at socio-political commentary on the recent war in Iraq. Along with the aforementioned search for alleged Weapons of Mass Destruction, there are also fudged references to the treatment of prisoners like those at Abu Ghraib prison and a slap dash swipe at America’s flip-flop viewpoint on who is actually `the enemy`. Unfortunately none of these ideas hold any weight due to the supporting cast of characters being so turgid, two dimensional and utterly forgettable removing any gravity from the revelations and their delivery. Throw in clumsy and predictable plot progression and characters who’s moral compass seems to swing back and forth faster than a metronome and there’s very little to drive the player from beginning to end other than being able to shoot things and blow them up.

Which, as a first person shooter, is arguably what Blacksite should be about. The game certainly gives the player plenty of targets and enough weaponry to do the job, with a mixture of the typical pistols, rifles and rocket launchers through to alien scatter shotguns and explosive fuel rod guns. All are suitably meaty and responsive so at least the player will have no problems on that front.

There are certainly briefly inspired and impressive moments in the game. Environments are certainly more varied than before, with open air desert roads, truck stops and desert towns to visit, as well as the secret underground bunker. Sequence-wise, notable examples include escaping from enemy forces by racing through the backyards of an American suburb, rounding a bend in a desert road to watch a freight train rumble past and using a mounted machine gun from a helicopter as it weaves around to take out an impressive gigantic alien blocking a bridge. Unfortunately these sections are fleeting and totally overshadowed by the game's flaws and appalling implementation. The rumbling train later comes off the tracks in a fiery wreck, and it’s actually a very fitting metaphor for the entire game. That is unless you backtrack a little in the level, in which case it still thunders on into infinity as if nothing is wrong further down the line...

A.I. squad mates are always present and can be directed to concentrate their fire or move to another position at the click of a button. Not that you’ll find much use for either of these functions as fire fights tend to be over quickly and those that aren’t are usually left down to the player to resolve by hitting specific targets. Your companions are also incredibly clingy, getting in the way when there’s no real need. While they are quite capable of holding off enemies during an on-foot shoot-out, the times when they are required to man the guns of a vehicle they loose all hand eye co-ordination and are suddenly incapable of hitting objects that are right in front of them. This is made worse by the game not allowing you to choose if you want to shoot or drive in some sections. On the subject of vehicles, for some reason none of them have doors. Either Midway would have us believe that the American Midwest is home to a huge syndicate of professional car door thieves or the dev team were unable to hire anyone who could model vehicles with doors.

The enemy A.I. doesn’t fair much better, allowing the player to breeze through the game in next to no time. On its hardest difficulty setting the game will offer more of a challenge but then its appalling checkpoint system makes a concerted effort to annoy and frustrate. As an example, once you’ve witnessed one of your squad taking a `comedy` pee break, complete with amazing magic act of teleporting in and out of a vehicle (despite it not having any doors), you’re unlikely to want to see it again any time soon.

But you will.

Repeatedly in fact, thanks to the on rails sequence that follows and the nigh on impossible task of avoiding being shot to pieces and it putting you right back to the urinating solider. This initially bland sequence quickly becomes downright irritating and it’s clearly not just the solider who is taking the piss. It’s as if the development team hated their own game and are making a concerted effort to get you to join them and snap the disc in half. The situation is made a hundred times worse by your team mate telling you to duck during the offending shooting section. Totally baffling considering it’s not even possible to do so.

Toss in the appallingly jagged graphics where no attempt has been made to smooth them out, severe frame rate problems, long loading times between deaths, some character models that look as if they were done by the work experience lad in-between making cups of tea and countless bugs which mean enemies appear and disappear before your eyes or jam you on scenery, and it’ll leave you wishing that Midway had never bothered to get this far.

If there was to be one small redeeming factor it’s that the Multiplayer aspect had potential at one point in time. Despite co-op being ripped out kicking and screaming at the last moment (the remnants of it can still be seen in some of the level design) the online is surprisingly solid, purely because it strips the game back to the only thing it does right (aiming and shooting) without all the other cack handed guff that has gone in to the single player. Aside from one particular mode the multiplayer is mind numbing bog standard and been done a hundred times before consisting of death match and capture the flag. Blacksite’s Abduction mode had real potential with one player being designated the alien and having to kill the others, thus recruiting them to their side. Sadly the online modes appear to have been stillborn and are almost devoid of players even this soon after the games release and you’ll be lucky to get a game with the minimum of four players let alone the maximum capacity of ten.

Playing the game, it’s clear that originally Midway had high hopes for it. Whether they ran in to problems with the Unreal engine not being flexible enough for their requirements or in trying to get the game finished on budget within the next millennia, is something only they can answer. But instead of creating the game they promised themselves in the design documents, the end result is a spaceship sized wreck of catastrophic proportions and with very little redeeming qualities to prevent it from being placed at the very bottom of the bargain bin where it belongs.