Blacksite: Area 51 Review

I bought this at a convention, the fact that I am more willing to try out games that aren't fondly remembered, and it was cheap did get me curious in buying it. It's also connected to the Area 51 game from 2005 and I remember having some fun with it. Honestly? I wasn't even expecting to get to the end of this game at all, I was expecting to reach a difficulty spike of some kind and drop but no, I actually managed to get to the of the game and finish it. As a whole I wouldn't call the game in the vein realm of "good" but as far as painfully mediocre games that are just "there" is concerned, it's not the worst. With that said, there is nothing about Blacksite Area 51 does isn't done better elsewhere like pretty much everyone has said.

I'll start with good. The game checkpoints pretty well and there isn't a whole of content you have to redo upon death, however if you choose to play on casual difficulty, you probably won't die that much to begin with since the player can take a lot of damage on that difficulty. I only died twice one during a mini boss with the giant grab creature where kamikaze enemies where attacking me while I was aiming a rocket at the former and the final boss since everything about the last level is poorly explained and I didn't know the game was scripted to have the fight take place inside of a closed interior, before that I just kept firing bullets and he wouldn't die.

There is no standard or normal difficulty of any kind, just easy, hard and very hard, which is pretty weird for a game like this. It's also pretty short and can pretty much be beaten in one sitting which is good since if a mediocre game like this was any longer, I would just start to get more and more annoyed and wish it would hurry up and end. The character of Grayson is pretty over the top and unhinged and his over the top lines did make me a smile a good deal.

Final positive is that the game does an okay job at breaking up the monotonous shooting by having a vehicle section, turret section, sniping, on rails rope rapelling and mini bosses and bosses. The game also does a decent job at guiding the player where to go with lighting and with environmental details even if the game is very linear.

This is where pretty much my praise ends. Like I said before everything Blacksite does has been done better in other games. You got the two weapon limit, melee attack, quick grenade throw, regen health and vehicle sections from Halo, the following around npcs in CoD games, the squad tactics in Rainbow 6 Vegas, and the whole alien invasion desert motif from Half Life 1 and 2.

There are some weird quirks with Blacksite that makes it inherently worse than those games, for one on console the default controls has two crouch buttons, the left analog stick crouch button isn't toggle but down on the D pad is so why have one that isn't toggle and the other that is? You could have the left analog stick click be a run button. Another quirk is how in CoD games when the player had to do a contextual action or if an NPC will activate the next sequence, these sections were made clear. In this game, it tries to have squad commands of R6 Vegas and be like CoD where there is always a marker for the player to press R1 in order for the NPCs and the player to do anything. Want to open a door? Wait for the red marker to turn green and then you can do it. Want to do anything do what I just said, everything that this pseudo squad and interaction system is waiting for the red indicator to turn green.

There is also technical bugs maybe this is just the PS3 version but there is a lot of level loading that disruptes the gameplay since you will be playing than the game just says "loading". This is an issue with 7th gen games but Blacksite has so many of these. There is also game breaking bugs that will make you reload from the menu to progress since there is no restart from checkpoint option.

Combat is pretty dull, despite this being a game where you fight aliens, many of them can be beaten with using the base M4 assault rifle at the start of the game. It has the same CoDesque combat where you just need to ADS, shoot, enemy dies, get hit, then hide behind cover, rinse repeat, all the combat entirely takes place in your forward direction.

The weapons are dull too. You mainly just kill everything with the M4 and enemies don't make noticeably reactions or sounds to getting shot making combat feel not so great. Compare this to fighting the Chimera in Resistance where they groan and get stagger to getting shot by the weapons.

You occasionally need a sniper and rocket launcher but those are during situational and specific moments. The alien shotgun is also pathetic since you don't even have any trace of the bullets land on the target you aim at.

Overall, it's been said many times that the game isn't good but the cheap price and short length enticed me to play. If anything, I'm just surprised I finished it and wrote this review at all.