BLACK Game Review

This is going to be a strange review but my experience with was kind of weird, so I will start off with my initial impressions:

I find the game to be decent fun, I also find it to be a "style over substance" game in the purest sense. The game is basically driven by it's over the top action movie feel in the gameplay, it does a good job at making you feel like you are in an over the top Hollywood action movie with explosions and constant destruction and the sound design and damage animations carries much of the game, but at the same time, the enemy encounters and level design mainly just consists of, "point, shoot and kill every enemy in sight".

This isn't bad on it's own, but every level mainly just consists of using every gun the enemy is using and blasting them away with machine guns or shotguns. And it's a human enemies with hitscan weapons game, so combat tends to be the same a lot of the time. Something like FEAR had the slo mo, enemy variety(by comparison to this game), arena like levels, and enemy AI to carry that game. Black is FEAR minus all that.

Black also doesn't have the varied objectives that other hitscan games at the time like Timesplitters and Half Life 2 do. The levels also kind of remind me of Resistance Fall of Man where it's you and a bunch of enemies and you get to the end of the stage with not much fluff inbetween, but Resistance had interesting guns, enemy variety and AI that can catch you off guard. Black doesn't have that either.

The game can be fun but I can see why even when I first played it, I never viewed as the "cult classic" that so many others view it as. The game is also really glitchy to play on an emulator as well. I got stuck in place, teleported to different parts of the map and the screen would have a different orientation. All of this can be done by reloading the last save state but it can be annoying when it happens to me.

But after play a couple hours later, these were my thoughts:

I got my more out of the gameplay in Black by messing around with the different firing options on the assault rifles. I think the high recoil on them actually encourages this. You will be missing shots like crazy if you keep using fully automatic mode but for mid range it's best to use burst fire and for long range, it's best to use single shot. It sucks I discovered this over halfway through the game but I do like to mess around with these things in games that let you do this.

All though I did play on emulator and used save states, I don't think the game is as hard as I remember it, the hard parts of the game is getting randomly ambused from behind and getting hit by rocket launcher enemies and not knowing their location before you kill them, it's a decent to at times good game but I still don't think it's amazing. I remember the ending being terrible at the time and time has only gotten me to dislike it even more with how much of a hard on 00s games had for cliffhangers.

So overall, despite my review being incoherent, I do think Black is a pretty good game but I think that is because the different firing options on the assault rifles adds more depth to the shooting, without this, the game is pretty one note and the game consists of being spray and pray and watching enemies die and killing every enemy in sight. I would give it a 6 if I didn't experiment with the AR's firing modes.