- Players: 1
- Platforms: PS2, Xbox
- Release Date: February 23rd, 2006
- Developer: Criterion Games
- Publisher: Electronic Arts
- Rating: Play It
Do you remember the single-player first-person shooter game from Criterion and EA called Black? It was for the PS2 and OG Xbox, had a decent marketing campaign but didn’t really make waves in terms of post-launch mind-share other than that everyone who played it felt it was one of the best first-person shooter titles ever made. I originally missed out on it while playing other games of the era, but recently had a chance to get around to it again, and it’s easy to see why it’s the cult-classic everyone claims it to be.
Story/Missions
The game features eight missions, totaling about six through ten hours of gameplay, depending on your skill level and if you opt to go with Easy or Normal as your starting difficulty. The controls are surprisingly intuitive to be a title released in 2006. It’s very similar to the Call of Duty default scheme, so gamers who are accustomed to today’s shooters will feel right at home.
The story is pretty straightforward: you take on the role of Jack Keller, working with a small group sent on a black ops mission to take down a rogue government asset named Lennox. The story is retold through an interrogation that recalls the eight locations that Keller and his team visited in their pursuit and alleged dispatching of Lennox and the terrorist group he was associated with. Anyone who has played Battlefield 3’s story will instantly catch the familiarity in the mission structure in Black.
The levels are spread across Eastern Europe, where you start in the war-torn town of Veblensk, and then proceed across the border, through a separatists shanty town on the outskirts, a heavily fortified weapons foundry, the tight-knit corridors of an asylum, a dockyard, a bridge, and finally the gulag.
Some of the missions range from taking half an hour to complete, to the Spetriniv Gulag, which can take up to an hour and a half to get through due to how long the level is.
What’s impressive here about Black is that levels don’t have lengthy load times in between segments, you seamlessly transition from one segment to the other, and some of the levels are extremely long. It kind of puts many of today’s linear, story-based games to shame when it comes to mission length design.
The other highlight of Black is that despite the levels being linear, there are a lot of areas to explore and rummage around; not quite on the level of old-school 1990s PC shooters like Doom, Blakestone or Duke Nukem 3D, but there are enough nooks and crannies containing various secondary objectives and secrets to warrant more than a single playthrough.
Replayability
This is actually a good time talk about Black’s replayability. Now a lot of people oftentimes have issues with single-player games that you can complete in four to six hours and cost $60 (or more). Black can be completed in a similar amount of time, but the highlight here is that six hours does not guarantee you that you’ll be anywhere near close to 100% completion.
In fact, the first playthrough will get you probably a third of the way through, and you’ll have to play through the game again, completing more objectives to unlock the harder difficulty settings, new weapon grades, and more ways to engage.
The game also features secondary objectives in addition to the primary objectives, so you can find or destroy additional intel to unlock new features in the game. It helps flesh out the replay factors significantly.
Black encourages players to consistently replay the game to unlock new things. Something that many new games don’t really encourage, nor feature prominently as an incentive to play it again. Most new games rely on microtransactions and DLC to flesh out the replay factors, and most gamers have been brainwashed to accept that that’s just how replayability is factored in. However, classic games like Black – made before EA went fully-on to the dark-side – showcases how you can make a compelling single-player game with replayability without making it chock-full of DLC.
Gameplay Content
Black is a straight-through first-person shooter. There are no mini-games, no vehicular segments, no on-rail segments, and the FMV cutscenes are limited to just the segments in between each level. In many ways, it’s a traditionally made shooter, which probably makes it stand out even more when compared to many of today’s more recent titles.
You have a crouch, zoom, shoot, grenade, melee, reload, and weapon-swap button. You can press up on the digital pad to change the fire-rate, or down on the digital pad to consume a health packet you pick up. And yes, this game uses health instead of the red-screen of death.
With the health, you can take damage from bullets, explosions, and other attacks, and you can either pick up health packets on the ground, or health kits that you can store. The packets replenish a small bit of health, usually dropped from downed enemies, but the health kits are scattered throughout the level that you usually have to scavenge for.
Weapon handling is very solid.
Each weapon feels impactful, but not every weapon is impactful. You have a variety of guns to choose from, including two different pistols, a magnum revolver, two different shotguns, a sniper rifle, three different assault rifles, a rocket launcher, and a grenade launcher. For anything that isn’t a shotgun, the magnum, or an explosive device, the enemies can definitely be spongy. If you’re not landing headshots then you’re going to be pumping a lot of rounds into enemies, especially with automatic fire selected.
This means you either need to pick your shots better or use a more powerful weapon. Now there is a bit of a downside to the controls insofar that the sensitivity is pretty stiff, and with the recoil, you may find yourself fighting against the aiming more than leaning into it.
Enemy AI
However, the game is fairly forgiving and you’ll find that you’re usually provided with the right kind of weapons to take down foes of various types. This includes standard soldiers, heavily armored shotgun-wielding berserkers, rocket men, snipers, gunners, and more.
While the visual variety is kept to a minimum, the way the enemies are handled is what makes them standout. You could compare Black to games like Half-Life or F.E.A.R in terms of the way the AI reacts and responds to the player’s presence, gunfire, suppression fire, and explosions.
This is what gives Black an edge even over many games today, because if you shoot at an enemy they will react. They will attempt to hide behind the nearest cover. They will take pot shots at you from a distance while another enemy attempts to flank you and close the distance; some enemies will lay down suppression fire while others charge in and move up to better positions, other times they may attempt to avoid being cornered or caught in the path of a grenade.
In essence, the enemy AI in Black feel like the developers put a lot of thought and dedication into bringing the enemies to life and ensuring that they feel both responsive and reactive to the player. They aren’t just static and there to be picked off like most common enemies in Call of Duty or Battlefield or any other vanilla shooter of the week.
This kind of enemy immersion helps bring the game’s tactical combat to life, and gives it a lot of legs to stand on as you’ll oftentimes find yourself checking your six after entering any room with more than one doorway to ensure an enemy isn’t flanking, following, or sneaking up behind you… because, a lot of times they will if they have the opportunity due to the way the maps are designs!
Map Design/Destruction
Where Black really shines is in its map design and the layout of the levels. While a lot of the levels are grungy, dilapidated ruins and post-Soviet looking urban blocks or installations, it’s how the environments are utilized that make them stand out. They’re articulately constructed to mirror shootouts from Hollywood movies, complete with exploding cars, exploding barrels, exploding buildings, and basically anything painted red is willing to go kaput. Shards, smoke, explosions and debris fill the screen in almost every scenario, as you can both use the environment to hide behind for cover and as an advantage to attack enemies or flush them out.
If enemies are hiding behind a car you can blow it up; if enemies are hiding behind crates or boxes, you can shoot them into smithereens. The highlight of Black is just how dynamic the environments are and how they can be used to completely reshape the firefights.
For instance, you might use a rocket launcher to blow out a wall or destroy a pillbox and then switch to a sniper rifle to pick off any remaining enemies who are forced out of cover since you’ve blown it sky high.
Maybe there is a sniper in a window? Blow out the entire floor he’s standing on by lobbing a bunch of explosives into the building. Enemies waiting to ambush you on the other side of a wall? Use a shotgun to blow out the wall entirely and lay waste to them before they can get to you.
The tactical advantages present in Black is what makes the game so engaging and fun, and the fact you can replay the game and experiment with different weapons and tactics opens up a slew of new possibilities for players who enjoy a solidly designed single-player FPS experience. It’s a shame we didn’t get a more robust single-player component in a game like Rainbow Six: Siege, because it’s very similar to Black, but it absolutely lacks the progressive stage designs and checkpoint-style approach to the levels.
Sound/Music
It should go without saying that the sound design in Black is spot on. The game features a menacing collection of weapon samples that sound as vicious as they look. You can hear the shells in the tubing as a round is rifled into the shotgun; you can hear the click as a magazine is ejected from an UZI during the heat of a firefight, and you get an absolute sense of dread every time you hear the whistle of an inbound rocket-propelled grenade fired from an RPG launcher.
The sound effects are excellent, and the bullet impacts match exactly how it seems like they should sound during an intense firefight.
The music is also adequately spaced. It kicks in when things get hairy and fades out during the more mellow moments.
Michael Giacchino’s contributions to the soundtrack are certainly standout, and hearkens back to an era in gaming when publishers were trying to bridge that gap between Hollywood and interactive entertainment. Sometimes it paid off and sometimes it didn’t, but here I would definitely say it paid off. Everything syncs up real well in Black in terms of audio design and musicality. I did think it was kind of odd how near the very end of the game they decided to throw a bunch of ‘F’ bombs into the title as if they desperately wanted to hit that ‘M’ for Mature rating from the ESRB, because it seemed kind of out-of-place compared to the rest of the game. That’s not to mention that there is no blood in Black, and so had they opted to leave the ‘F’ bombs at the door, the game could have easily achieved a ‘T’ for Teen rating.
Visual Effects/Graphics
When you consider games of the era you have to think about the year they were made and the hardware they were available on. That being said, Black looks about as good as you would expect it to given the PS2’s capabilities and the fact it was out just before the PS3 and Wii hit the market.
That’s not to say that Black looks terrible or anything, it just looks like a game made in 2006 for the PS2 or OG Xbox. The model files are decent enough and the environments are scaled to what you would expect from a mid-aught game set in Eastern Europe. The weapon models aren’t quite on par to games like Doom 3 and Halo 2, which were dominating the market at the time, but they do look good enough for what the game is attempting to portray.
You get a sense of weight and impact when wielding the shotgun, and great visuals when firing the rocket launcher. The grenade launcher also is a blast to use, and some of the weapons, like the MP5 and UZI are actually designed quite well, with good enough mesh work and texturing that could almost make you forget Black was on the PS2. The M16, however, and G36 do look fairly dated, however.
One major drawback is that obviously the 5th gen consoles lacked physically based rendering, so the lighting is not going to be all that enticing, and much of the environment is going to appear dated and old, even drab.
However, the highlight of Black isn’t just in its graphics but rather the visual presentation of destruction. It’s easy to forget about the old-school graphics while you’re plowing through enemies and blasting things to smithereens. It makes you feel like Arnold Schwarzenegger from Commando or Sylvester Stallone from Rambo 3. That’s the sort of thing a lot of gamers have craved for out of their shooters, and Black delivers in spades. Glass shatters, doors dent, walls blast apart, and parts of the building collapse. It all works and works well.
Overall
You owe it to yourself to play Black. You can either grab a used copy from an online retailer or an ISO from a willing website. Either way, the game offers six to ten hours of enjoyable first-person combat the likes of which hearkens back to the heyday of FPS titles during the PC’s ascent to master race status in the 1990s. Though, ironically, Black isn’t available for PC.
In any case, it’s well worth playing and definitely something you should check out if you get an opportunity to do so.