BlackSite: Area 51 (PS3)

There is certainly something impressive about Midway Games trying to build a series out of reinterpreting just what alien secrets could be hiding in the United States’s Area 51 facility, but unfortunately BlackSite: Area 51, known in some territories as just BlackSite, is also one of the clearest signs of the flagging state of the company back in 2007. A lack of playtesting and a rushed development have a visible mark on the end product, because while there are parts of the title that could have worked, problems will continue to rear their ugly head as you play.

Despite being a rushed game about shooting aliens, BlackSite: Area 51 does attempt a bit of commentary on war and politics with its plot. Beginning with the player heading off to Iraq in the role of Captain Pierce, the earliest part of the game involves what seems like a raid on Iraqi bunker only for the player to have their first encounter with the aliens who will make up the main antagonistic force for the rest of the game. Cut ahead a few years later and Pierce is called to Nevada as a group of humans called Reborn who were experimented on by the government using alien tech have begun an insurrection with the help of the aliens who their upgrades were taken from. There is an undeniable message about the expendability of American soldiers underlying the whole story, but BlackSite: Area 51 is really mostly a game about shooting down alien creatures and the Reborn soldiers with the story pushing in at parts to make your conflict with the Reborn leader more interesting. It’s hard for the game to establish the emotional weight it tries going for though when a lot of characters are only said to be important or mostly just hang around until their dramatic death, with one character even greeting you by bringing up his daughter out of the blue just so his future death can be far too obvious for you to get invested in the character before then.

This game’s particular approach to aliens does lend itself to a decent batch of enemy designs though. The Reborn are perhaps your most common concern, these essentially just being men with guns so that this first person shooter has some proper gunfights for the player to participate in. There are definitely times where the game places them poorly like in an area of the game where they are hiding in the side of a mountain sniping you but they blend in with the scenery too much, but for the most part they fill their role as the most competent enemy type and the one most likely to take you down. The more traditional aliens, known here as Xenos, come in a few different breeds that are certainly easier to avoid damage from but add a decent layer of variety to the conflicts. From humanoid creatures who charge at you that will sometimes pretend to die only to rise up and attack you to tiny explosive ones who attack in swarms, they mix up the tactics different aliens try well enough, with some like the giant worm monsters and the boss beasts even encouraging you to do more than just empty your machine gun into them.

Unfortunately, the weapon options in BlackSite: Area 51 are quite limited. Your carbine is such an effective weapon at any range and is given so much ammo there’s very little reason to bother with the other options, with the sniper rifle being slow and low in ammo, the pistol being there just to back up your machine gun if it’s empty, and things like the rocket launcher meant for specific scenarios. There are alien weapons in the form of what are essentially a small sci-fi shotgun and a grenade launcher, both being big slow shots that aren’t the best for the long range firefights and not necessary for the aliens who will run in close. This is definitely a machine gun shooter, but a few things do help this not become incredibly bland. You have grenades to flush out enemies who are usually placed to require decent movement and cover use to survive, Captain Pierce able to recover damage if he avoids damage for a while but death being a real possibility on the higher difficulties. There are turret segments and driving segments that are a bit easier even with the odd driving controls, but for the most part, shooting remains possible and those turret and driving shakeups do allow the focus to shift enough that this isn’t always just about pointing your machine gun at every alien you see.

A squad mechanic also helps this be a bit more than a generic first-person shooter as well. Pierce will be accompanied by one or two soldiers during most parts of the game, the captain able to give orders to them like which target to focus fire on, where they should stand during a firefight, or telling them to go breach a door. These allies can actually be very helpful in a fight, making them proper backup rather than just a narrative addition so that Pierce isn’t going alone. However, they are tied to a morale system, where the team’s performance in a battle can lead to them getting worse if you don’t cover them or if you get sloppy yourself… at least in theory that’s what it means. Keeping morale high seems to be the normal state of things and dips in morale seem hard to prevent even though they’re somewhat uncommon. In a clustered firefight a partner may put themselves in a bad spot or an enemy might just get a lucky hit in, and while they won’t die, your partners can quickly become useless due to those moments of bad luck. You can definitely handle enemies on your own if need be though, so this finicky system isn’t too bad, and it’s not nearly as bad as some of the technical issues the game faces because of its rushed development.

Moving between areas in BlackSite: Area 51 is a needlessly clunky affair as the game bars your movement for too long or struggles to keep up with the action. Loading screens are a constant nuisance even with the game patch meant to help them along, with action sometimes grinding to a halt as you pushed into an area the game wasn’t ready for you to see yet. In some areas to continue you need to command your soldiers to open the path ahead, a marker turning from red to green when it’s available… but at times this marker just won’t work or change, making it seem like the game has broken until it suddenly starts working again. Technical issues hurt the plot as well. There are no subtitles, meaning you’ll need to listen to follow along, but the audio can get choppy at points or start playing over a loading screen rather than when its meant to be cued up in the cutscene or gameplay. Even when the game finds a rhythm that could work, the loading screens can start dragging things down, not to mention some slowdown that can occur if you play the game for too long. Even if you decide to try and engage with the game’s story, it can end up hard to hear due to technical bugs, not to mention hearing it during gunfights can involve a lot of futzing with the noise levels in the menu. While there hasn’t been too much that BlackSite: Area 51 really excelled at yet, these issues prevent it from being an acceptable first-person shooter title.

There are multiplayer modes in BlackSite: Area 51, all of them restricted to online play and hard to arrange any play since they’re attached to a game very few would likely want to play online. Despite its technical issues during the story campaign, the shooting could have been passable in multiplayer, and BlackSite: Area 51 has the expected suite of first-person shooter modes like Deathmatch and Capture the Flag that focus on killing enemies the most and capturing and delivering a flag between bases respectively. There are special powerups to make things more interesting than plain shootouts such as damage ups and a stealth power, but it’s most unique option would have to be the mode where one player is a Reborn and they convert enemies to their side by killing them, the goal shifting based on whether you’re a human or a Reborn at the moment. 10 maps make for a decent bunch and they reuse some of the main game’s better areas, but the potential for getting 10 players together for a decent match is low for an older lesser known title like this. Considering that, at best, you could hope for a decent experience here and would likely get less than that, it ends up hard to recommend even the game’s unique multiplayer mode.

THE VERDICT: Perhaps there was potential for BlackSite: Area 51 to be a passable first-person shooter for the kind of player who just wants to shoot some aliens, but the run of the mill shooting smacks into too many barriers thanks to its poorly coded game design. Slowdown and loading problems bring things to a halt too often, meaning that even when the game mixes in its alien or area designs decently, the flow of the game can never get going. Most everything in this mediocre shooter has some small flaw, like your sometimes helpful AI partners not behaving as they should or the plot being hard to follow because of audio problems, but ultimately the game feels like going to a rocky beach barefoot. You can find a few moments that aren’t too bad, but constant little annoyances and issues undermine what could have been an alright experience.

And so, I give BlackSite: Area 51 for PlayStation 3…

A BAD rating. If BlackSite: Area 51 worked as intended, it wouldn’t be a stellar game by any measure, but it could at least let you get lost in the simplicity of its first-person shooting. Even with the machine gun being superior to most options, the enemies are usually spaced well enough and mixed around just enough that this wouldn’t be the most exciting game, but one that still wouldn’t hurt to spend a few hours on, with a few moments that do work well and a few more lackluster ones balancing out to something overall serviceable. However, the tiny problems keep piling up, whether it be the AI partners deciding to flop between being helpful and being useless, the story dialogue ending up cliched or hard to hear, and most importantly the technical problems that prevent anything from getting too far without a hitch or adding a long boring wait as the game tries to catch up with you. Much like the multiplayer, BlackSite: Area 51’s main story isn’t so much awful as it is placed behind barriers that prevent enjoyment. Getting people together to play a mostly bland multiplayer or playing through a mostly bland single player alone do not really justify overcoming the roadblocks and technical problems both approaches face, leaving BlackSite: Area 51 with no leg left to stand on.

BlackSite: Area 51 is a mediocre shooter that sinks just a bit lower because the developers didn’t have the time to make sure even such a basic game ran properly. A few ideas hold promise like the mixture of alien types and the Reborn focused multiplayer mode, but Midway Games gave up on quality control in favor of trying to right their sinking ship with a quick game release. More time to work on it might not have made it something special, but some more time in the oven would at least give BlackSite: Area 51 the chance to reach an acceptable level of quality.