| Black review |
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Good things, as the adage goes, come in small packages; a mantra Jude Law repeats furiously in the mirror every morning. It is in this mindset, the plate du jour of the gaming industry (providing the ephemeral gaming experience for an ever-older average player with concomitantly less free time), that Criterion unleash Black upon us.
In the twilight of the current gen, RenderWare gives its last brave huzzah. The 360 has sparkled s(l)ickly with Perfect Dark Zero’s ridiculously coruscating shaders and bumpmapping and Call of Duty 2’s looming fog of war: does Black do what it says on the tin and give one final big, stupid bang for those unwilling or unable to make the jump to Generation Next?
The answer is: kinda.
Black is a Michael Bay movie writ in game form, right down to its post-Soviet/Eastern European warzone milieus, Tony Scott-slick live-action cutscenes and macho grunting (lots of f***s uttered and an instance of the phrase “swinging dick”). In the spirit of such, it essentially follows the Bay/Bruckheimer template of “explosion, boobs, explosion”… except that instead of “boobs”, there’s another explosion instead. This is Black’s combustible raison d’être: everything, practically, can be destroyed, and destroyed with magnificent aplomb. If it can’t, it really wasn’t worth blowing up in the first place.
Levels are littered with gas tanks, ammunition boxes, mines, fuel trucks, barrels of random hi-ex stuff… anything that’s handily coloured red, baby, is dying for your bullets (or grenades, or RPGs) to make it go kaboom. And the resultant explosions are impressive indeed: windows shatter into crystalline oblivion; smoking particles fly in all directions; concrete columns are destroyed piecemeal with Matrix-like friability; partition walls are rent asunder to facilitate passage; cover is stripped away from cowering enemies who flee as you decimate that bit of corrugated iron they were hiding behind; satisfyingly meaty whumps, chest-thumping radio chatter and the sonic boom of bullets assail your ears from every DD5.1 vector… it’s great fun, in a brutish way, and the destruction never really gets dull – no overhyped, crappy Red Faction 2-style “geomodding” here. Enemies lovingly congregate about hazardous materials and cascade like the beautiful, screaming ragdolls they are as they get a fireball up the fundament (and, as with nearly every such physics library extant, there are amusing gaffes: enemies floating in mid-air Jesus Christ poses and guys with Mr. Fantastic stretchy arms were among a few that we noticed).
Which isn’t to say the AI is dumb; rather, that it generously gives you the opportunity to indulge your craven explosive gland before it runs off and returns fire. Get into a straight firefight, and enemies duck, weave and try to avoid grenades – they won’t sit dumbly as you snipe at their comrade’s noggin. The only downsides are very little variety in enemy types and models, consisting of only five or six, and enemies who spawn right above your head in certain rooms.
While Black lasts, it’s a real shot in the arm. Everything feels and looks right; despite succumbing to a few things emblematic of RenderWare (reflectivity is a bit silly, textures can be a touch scuzzy close-up) everything is silky smooth and bathed in bloom and haze. This is no Doom III or Riddick, to be sure – models and environments, particularly interior corridors and rooms, can occasionally seem a touch on the basic, cartoonish side compared to those Xbox tours de force of normal mapping, but everything is sewn together well (and undoubtedly is more impressive in PS2 land), with some of the industrial-themed levels being extremely well-hewn. For some reason, enemy animation cycles can seem bizarrely clockwork if viewed from far off (snipe at one and he seems to become staccato in his movements) but otherwise things are graphically very nice indeed, in that plastic-sheen Criterion way.
Black utilises the de rigueur post-Halo 2-weapon system, although it doesn’t embrace chic rechargeable shield/CoD2 vitality mechanics: instead, it’s antiquated health packs and first aid kits. The eight levels are reasonably varied (although most exhibit a drab, desaturated palette of grey and brown - all the better, one supposes, to emphasise those big crimson explosions), including a “crossing the bridge” affair which nearly rivals Half-Life 2’s for enjoyment, although Black offers up no combative enemy tanks or aircraft to terminate extremely prejudicially. Some levels offer reasonably open navigation, allowing objectives to be approached from several directions, but this doesn’t lend itself to any great strategy - not that it’s required - and often ducking off the immediate, beaten track is only necessary to complete secondary objectives, which are old-school “Find the Document/Bonus Weapon” affairs. A fair amount of levels only lead you down narrow corridors and the like, though, so when the game does open up, it’s appreciated.
But (and it’s a big but, as Pee Wee Herman might say) Black is, even by deliberately short ‘n’ sweet standards, ridiculously brief. On first play, the intro movie (simple white titles over a black background) is unskippable. It goes on for a looong time. Similarly, the tacky cutscenes are unskippable: considering they have as much relevance to the game as Posh Spice has to music and just obstruct diving straight into the action one has to wonder why… to make the game feel longer, perhaps?
Regulation difficulty modes are available (Hard and then Black Ops are unlocked on playthrough) to lengthen the challenge but on Normal, this will probably last you 4-6 hours (we clocked Normal at 4:32 according to the game and meandered a fair bit, although your profile doesn’t record multiple failed attempts at a section, of which there weren’t many). Hard mode adds little, other than removing retainable health packs, making the player reliant upon the prodigiously dropped first aid kits of enemies. The AI doesn’t seem any more aggressive or canny, and, in truth, it’s only the last two or three levels that seem noticeably tougher in Hard, although lengthy gaps between checkpoints do become far more noticeable, and since gameplay is identical otherwise (why can’t enemy spawning points be dynamic, for example, just to shake up the mix a little?) and you HAVE to play through on Hard to unlock Black Ops mode… well, it just feels like an enforced trudge. Black Ops ups the ante considerably, with a destruction quotient and infinite grenades, although the collectathon element of having to complete EVERY secondary objective is a major chore.
Since Criterion is novitiate in the big bad FPS world, one can forgive the odd faux pas of convenience: there’s the occasional invisible wall; tiny kerbs and low fences (a la Killzone) are like mighty dams to your highly skilled though jump-deficient special ops agent. Such foibles are commonplace in console FPSes, to be sure, but their presence still rankles, especially after the vaulting thoroughbred of 360 Call of Duty 2 and frustratingly so when a much-needed first aid kit rests atop some crates and you can’t… jump… on… them. Despite promising a rollercoaster ride of Schwarzeneggerian proportions, Black still falls back on long-distance sniping and conventional set pieces (which play essentially identically each time), rather than the vaunted chained explosion mechanic, making those sections feel somewhat pedestrian and akin to myriad other console special ops shooters, SWAT, Killzone et al amongst them. Also, the design decision to enter into a fullscreen blur effect upon every reload is exasperating and unnecessary, making keeping track of middle-distance enemies needlessly tough – it’s obviously an attempt at simulating a shallow depth-of-field when concentrating on reloading your weapon, but it’s rampantly over the top.
The absence in any way, shape or form of multiplayer is another looming black mark against the game (behold the pun, ye mighty, and despair) because even some simple deathmatch modes, whilst potentially shallow and short-lived, on existing, cut-down maps would’ve given this title more lifespan: explosive multiplayer monkey shines beckon. Criterion has stated in pre-release interviews that it wasn’t interested bundling in some hoary old multiplayer modes just for the sake of it, and it's possible to see the shallowness of "blow everything up" deathmatch being exposed all too quickly, but surely it would have added some perceived value for money.
All of which sounds overly harping and negative, which it shouldn’t, because Black is great fun, to be sure – it’s just not some divine revelation. Instead, it has nothing to show you that you won’t see within two days, at the outside: whether you feel this is worth a full-price purchase or merely a rental is subjective - a shame, but there’s plenty of worthy fodder here to be expanded upon in the inevitable EA-sanctioned yearly sequel/update.
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System: Microsoft Xbox
Genre: First Person Shooter
Developer: Criterion Studios
Publisher: EA
Players: 1
Version: European
Reviewed: Mar 2006
Writer: Bill Fuller
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Pros:
- Blowing things up is never boring
- Slick and intense
- Guns have rarely sounded better
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Cons:
- Very brief
- No multiplayer whatsoever
- In large part still a fairly standard console FPS
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Black Video: 6.9MB
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