- Players: 1 (Multiplayer PvP)
- Platforms: PS3, Xbox 360, PC
- Release Date: November 12th, 2007
- Developer: Midway Studios
- Publisher: Midway Games
- Rating: Skip It
Why? That’s all I really have to ask. Why? This game is like one of those titles that was hodge-podged together on a blackboard with almost no oversight, a budget both too big and too small for what they wanted to do, and no discernible direction that would have actually resulted in this project becoming anything more than a forgettable Saturday-afternoon romp before being carted off to a GamStop where it would spend the rest of its carbon existence collecting dust in the $9.99 or less bargain bin. That really sums up the entirety of Blacksite: Area 51, which – unfortunately – I can’t even say had potential to be a good game.
It’s barely four hours in length, has a now defunct multiplayer PvP mode that likely wasn’t good to begin with, and literally zero replay values.
Apparently this is kind of a pseudo-sequel to the 2005 Midway FPS for Xbox and PS2, which was a pseudo-sequel to the arcade game from 1995 called Area 51. That game was a typical, cheesy light-gun fest made in a similar vein to classics like Virtua Cop and the Time Crisis Series.
The 2007 outing takes a more traditional, Call of Duty-esque approach to the formula, and I can’t say it paid off well, because it really didn’t.
Story
There’s really nothing to the story other than that some soldiers were being experimented on in a secret lab using crashed extraterrestrial technology. The soldiers rebelled, and it’s up to the player’s squad to stop the alien invasion, which consists of both the experimental soldiers and alien invaders from another planet/dimension.
The game attempts to ground the story a bit first starting in the middle-east, where the player’s squad is sent in to fight off terrorists. It then turns into a fight for survival against aliens, where one of your squad mates gets captured.
Some time later the alien invaders make their way to the U.S., where the military attempts to repel the invasion using classic weaponry. The game plays out in a plot-point-to-plot-point fashion where you go to various locations to clear out the aliens invaders just until you make your way back to their main base to destroy them for good.
The locations are sort of okay when it comes to the actual designs, but the environments aren’t interactive, and they’re really passe. So it’s not like you have a lot of interactivity to look forward to like in Black on the PS2, where there was a lot of destructible environments to really help bring the shootouts to life.
The problem in Blacksite: Area 51 is that whether you’re in the suburbs, a construction site, a movie theater, or a trailer park, it’s all static, and the environments neither lend themselves to the engagement nor increase the immersion due to the fact that you can’t destroy anything or interact with anything. It’s like being in one big doll house.
Gameplay Content
Majority of the game will consist of using the M4 assault rifle and a pistol. You’ll have access to a sniper rifle, a rocket launcher, an alien shotgun, and an alien rifle. However, you will likely and literally spend the entire game just using the army-issued M4 assault rifle until you’re forced to use something else. It’s the most reliable and efficient weapon in the game, but sadly you can’t upgrade, modify or customize it in any way, which further detracts from the game’s fun factors.
Everything else is either subpar or lame. The alien weapons in particular aren’t very fun to use, and feel like knockoff weapons from Half-Life 2.
Given the lack of environmental interaction, and the fact that the enemy AI are extremely static (just like the environments) you won’t find yourself having to rely on too many weapons outside of the army’s assault rifle.
In fact, unless you’re forced to use the sniper rifle in a few levels, it’s best to just skip it altogether.
You’ll also be forced to use the rocket launcher in some contained boss level fights, one of which is super annoying that takes place in an army base. You basically have to reach a control tower and use the rocket launcher up there, otherwise you’ll keep getting killed relying on the other launchers scattered around the area. It was probably the one part I got stuck on the longest.
Everything else in the game is unconventionally lackluster.
The fact that enemies just kind of stand around and pepper you with fire makes them very boring to fight. Again, unlike games like Crysis or Black, two games that were out around the same time (and one of which was a PS2 exclusive), the enemies won’t use the environment to entrap you or flank you.
The enemy variety is also really limited. There are some crawly mutants, some armed foes, and a large alien mutant that works as a boss throughout the game. Oh yeah, there’s also a giant tentacle monster that’s also another boss, which you fight a couple of times, too.
Limited enemy variety isn’t an issue if they’re used well, like in Half-Life. However, the enemies are not used well in Blacksite: Area 51, and you will repeatedly fight the same foes over and over again in the aforementioned static environments.
If the firefights weren’t so frivolous, and the weapon handling wasn’t so banal, maybe it could have been fun. Again, Black mostly limited the weapon selections to just three or four weapons per level, but the weapons all felt fun to use, and the environments were dynamic, so it didn’t feel like a chore playing through the levels.
Blacksite: Area 51 attempts to mix up its monotony with more monotonous, linear driving levels and on-rail shooting segments, but none of it helps. The driving segments consists of driving along roads and dodging mines, getting out occasionally to shoot at enemies and then moving on to your destination. The physics are floaty and stilted at the same time, a very common occurrence for a lot of games during that era that weren’t racing sims.
The on-rail segments usually consisted of helicopter levels where you would have to shoot at enemies while perched in the helicopter, picking off enemies while gallivanting toward your designated destination.
Oh, I almost forgot about another mechanic in the game… the Squad Morale. This is a feature where your squadmates will or will not follow orders based on their morale. If they get pinned down by enemy AI and you’re a lousy shot where they keep getting downed, their morale will lower. When their morale lowers, you end up with AI teammates who won’t follow your commands when you tell them to target certain enemies or move to a certain location.
It’s not a particularly inspired feature, and is severely lacking in comparison to say Star Wars: Battlefront II from Pandemic Studios for the PS2, OG Xbox and PC. If you remember in that game you could also give your squad commands, but you had to achieve a certain rank on the battlefield. The higher your rank, the more AI teammates you could command and control, which made sense. Here, you could tell it’s an afterthought of a feature, and unless you’re blatantly reminded of it, you likely won’t remember that it exists.
Sound/Music
You won’t remember much of anything from Blacksite: Area 51 in the audio department. The voice acting is typical from that era of gaming, with plenty of over-acting or generic voice lines that don’t really do much to change how gamers will feel about either the characters or the story.
The weapon sounds are also weak sounding and don’t feel all that impactful. In fact, you might find yourself getting bored listening to the constant ratta-tat-tat of the M4 and opt to turn down the volume and turn on your own music.
Why? Because the music in the game is completely forgettable. While the level design is completely linear like Call of Duty, it completely lacks the zeal and panache of Call of Duty. Regardless of how you feel about that series, you at least have to admit that the production values are completely on-point.
The games usually have a soundtrack done by top-notch composers in the music industry, and cinematic set-pieces to make the linear levels feel a little less linear.
Here? None of that is present. Blacksite: Area 51’s levels are linear and proud of it. Not much of a reason to go back through them unless you want to find some useless documents to unlock profiles and images in the extras menu. I mean if you’re an absolute stickler for being a completionist you might find that entertaining, but there was little there to keep be glued to the game, and even less incentive to go back scouring through the small levels looking for documents I may have missed.
But to the point of the music, the game doesn’t have a memorable soundtrack. There are no catchy theme songs or tunes you might find yourself wanting to listen to on repeat like Halo, Battlefield, Mass Effect, Gears of War or heck even Tenchu. Like every other aspect of the game, Blacksite: Area 51‘s audio production is completely forgettable.
Graphics/Visuals
How do you make an already forgettable game more forgettable? How about using washed out Unreal Engine textures, boring shaders, and unremarkable visual effects? Well, if that was your answer then you nailed it, because that’s exactly what the graphics are like in Blacksite: Area 51.
Everything about this game is so predictably unremarkable. The models for the characters are decent enough, and in a better game you could easily excuse the lack of personality they exhibit if the game was actually fun and innovative, or at least cinematically engaging… like Call of Duty or Black, or Soldier of Fortune, or Rainbow Six: Vegas. But that just isn’t the case here. The character models are generic and drab (though to their credit at least this was during the period where female characters, even those in the military, were made to look slender and attractive as opposed to the hideous abominations we have to suffer through during today’s current era of video games).
The lighting is all basic standard-fare Unreal cube-mapping with the most basic of specular highlights and the most generic of shadows. Literally, everything about this game screams generic.
If it were at least more stylized, either by being more realistic or more cartoony – just something that was either one way or the other that didn’t make it seem completely forgettable compared to all the other schlock out at the time, like Frontlines: Fuel of War, Medal of Honor, Advanced Warfighter, Soldiers of Fortune and about a dozen and one other knockoff South Korean MOFPS titles.
A good comparison to another Unreal Engine 3 game that at least utilized style-over engine limitations is Clive Barker’s Jericho. Interestingly enough, the game was limited to just a release on PS3 and XBox 360, but Mercury Steam managed to at least make it stand out from the competition. It was tough to get it confused with most other games on the market due to the designs, though admittedly it still looked a bit like a more stylish knockoff of Gears of War, which was kind of an issue for a lot of Unreal Engine 3 games of the time.
Overall
Absolutely cannot recommend anyone waste their time with Blacksite: Area 51. The multiplayer is defunct so even if you wanted to test it out for that, you’ll have tough luck getting it to work.
The graphics are nothing to write home about, the audio design is forgettable, and the single-player portion is about three and a half hours of samey shootouts, on-rail segments, a few driving instances, and ho-hum level designs that may as well be cardboard cutouts from a paintball simulation.
If you want a good FPS from that era, absolutely checkout games like Halo 3, Black, Half-Life 2, BioShock, Stranglehold or Call of Duty: Modern Warfare. There’s nothing present in Blacksite: Area 51 that you won’t find done bigger and overall better in the aforementioned titles.
