reviews



black for xbox - by brophy

< back to reviews

3/28/06
Black is the game that they have that commercial for. You know, the one where the walls and mirrors and paintings and Caesar busts are getting all shot up. I usually don't get sucked into game commercials. I usually don't even like most FPS's because nothing feels quite as right as Halo. But for some reason I saw that commercial and I was like 'man, too bad that game is only out for PS2.' I have no idea why I thought that, but I was so sure of it and when I walked by the Xbox display and saw Black for the Xbox and I was like 'HA! suxors i found black and now it's mine.' Most people wouldn't call it an impulse purchase because it was $50, but considering some of the dumb shit I've thrown down for, this game might as well have been next to the candy bars at the checkout for all the thought i put into it.

Anyhow, I'll tell you right away that the commercial was misleading. Bullets don't fly through anything and everything in the environment. You can shoot out doors and rip apart some furniture. It's a pretty weird feeling when you shoot a table in the middle of the room and the top flies apart but the frame and legs remain intact no matter what. And then there's a TV next to it AND WHO DOESN'T WANT TO SHOOT UP A TV and the TV isn't part of the destructable environment. And then you go to walk out the room and the frame of the table is blocking your way. Seriously this happens to me in every building. Anybody who's played the game must surely know what I'm talking about.

I'll get to the good parts of the game in a minute, but for now I want to bitch about how there's no jumping. I realize that jumping in most games gets so super-human that it's ridiculous, but you really have to have some ability to get over the smallest obstacles, especially as a special forces officer. On the other hand, the no-jumping is actually implemented pretty cleverly as a way to tell you where to go. If you walk down a single step, there's no going back up so at least you know you're on the right track. That's kinda nice because the environments in this game are pretty expansive, and well-rendered for that matter. But I'm not talking about good stuff yet.

The AK-47 absolutely blows as the main weapon in this game. I really love how you can switch from single-shot to burst to full-auto, but it takes a million rounds to kill a guy. I know this game is pretty ambitious in its persuit of 'realism', and I've never actually shot anybody in real life, but I've been led to believe that if you do shoot a guy in or around the face, he doesn't just turn his head like he's been punched and continue firing accurately at you. He especially doesn't continue to do this after you've shot him in and around the face 7 or 8 times.

Just about everything else in the game is wicked awesome. Every weapon other than the AK kicks complete ass and the one aspect of the game where the 'realism' doesn't seem so phoned in is how they don't give you a ton of ammo for the badass weapons. You really have to know when to use them. The shotgun and sniper rifle are essentially one-shot kills anywhere you hit a guy, which is an immense relief after emptying clip after clip of assault rifle rounds just to kill one dude. And it's always a lot of fun to find some big combustible off in the distance to fire an RPG at and watch the chain reaction it causes.

Apparently there's a storyline that I should be following in the game. I really ought to know it since you can't skip the cutscenes in between missions. I can never get more than one mission done in a night because when those cutscenes come on I go to see what's on Cartoon Network, and Robot Chicken is always on and I want to see if it's the episode that Scarlett Johansson's in and if I can pick out which voices she does. Also the missions take me almost an hour to complete. So by the time I go through one mission, then get bored with the fucking twenty minute cutscene, then watch Adult Swim until it repeats itself at 2:00 AM, the Xbox's idle mechanism has shut it down and I'm too tired to get up and turn it back on.

So I don't know if I'd say the game is fun, but it's definitely a good game to immerse yourself in. I feel like it says a lot about an FPS when you're actually careful going around corners. After an hour of wandering around and watching your back it feels pretty rewarding to complete a mission, and it's pretty unusual for a game to give you that kind of satisfaction. All I can say is there are certain parts of the game where you want to curse the programmers for trying to jam this sense of realism down your throat. Fortunately, your anger is easily relieved by switching to the shotgun and blasting some dude in the chest and watching him fly back 10 feet.



< back to reviews