Black (Xbox)
The box art to Black has stuck with me for many years. The image of a cover absolutely crowded with bullets was a common fixture on store shelves, but I never bit the bullet and bought it, mainly because the generic title coupled with that cover made me think it would probably be some generic first-person military shooter. Judging by a cover is certainly not the best practice, but now that I’ve finally played it, I can say I wasn’t too far from the mark despite the game having some interesting features that somewhat set it apart.
Taking place in the Russian regions closest to the Middle East, Black involves Sergeant Jack Kellar performing a CIA black op to take down leaders of the terrorist arm dealers known as the Seventh Wave. However, he immediately faces complications when he encounters a former United States operative who has assumed control of the group. Breaking away from official orders but still receiving help from other like minded CIA operatives, Sgt. Kellar pushes into Chechnya and Ingushetia to try and dismantle the Seventh Wave by finding and taking down their new leader. There really isn’t much progression to this plot however, the story being a sort of typical trek through different areas important to the enemy forces as you track down the man in charge, but there is an interesting choice made in how this straightforward military story is told. The game is told in retrospect by Kellar as he is being interrogated about the events that occurred during his rebellious tear into southwest Russia, the scenes themselves presented as live action footage that has been put through so many filters it almost doesn’t look like it features real actors at all. This framing and the real actors don’t do much to help the bland plot, but it is the type of serviceable spine that the game’s eight missions can attach themselves to and use to justify their different locations.
The locations are actually Black’s biggest strength. Whether you’re passing through a cemetery, dockyard, devastated city, or the forest around a military base, your path through them is more than just walking forward. Areas will often split into two or more paths. One might feature multiple elevations in a single room to spice up firefights with enemies on different levels while another path might take you down tighter corridors where you encounter different resistance or find more ammo and health pick-ups. You’re free to pick which you prefer, some allowing for stealthier approaches and others favoring more bombastic gun fights, and this small degree of freedom even applies to larger areas. More open spaces will include plenty of cover or buildings to pass through as you move around performing objectives, and while these will have prescribed locations you have to visit, the size of these spaces can often allow for a more free form approach where you move between them based on the current battle dynamic or the kind of fire fight that suits your skills. Both you and the enemy can benefit from the openness in design, ambushes, encampments, and different weapon strategies making the layouts a good fit for a first person shooter. They even feature plenty of destructible elements, wooden structures and gravestones easy to obliterate with gun fire and many areas that start off in decent shape ending up rubble by the end of the fire fight. You might enter a military base that is well put together and walk away from buildings who had entire sides of them blown out, enemy cover can sometimes be torn to shreds to expose them, and shooting down doors and walls with a shotgun is sometimes required to get to certain side areas. On top of seeing most every bullet shell at your feet during a fight, Black is definitely trying to make its gunfights seem explosive and exciting, dispensing with a realistic plot to achieve it. The story does end in an odd way where it feels like more could have been accomplished, but despite making you feel like a one man army with its destructible environments and giving you things like explosives and rolling barrels to shoot to take out enemies, you are not meant to actually be the man who solves the entire problem on his own.
The weapons featured in the game are pretty good too even though they might initially seem like the military shooter starter pack. Yes you’ll have pistols, machine guns, shotguns, and so on, but the differences between certain makes of them are tangible and the weapons all seem to pack an appropriate level of power. A shotgun feels like the burst of death it would be in real life, enemies who are too close getting killed almost immediately and ones who are far away suffering decent damage even if the shot won’t land every pellet. Machine guns all fire sprays with varying levels of recoil, but you can quickly come to learn their differences thanks to distinct designs that often tie to the individual power of a bullet from them. A mean looking heavy automatic can chew through a foe easily while the smaller makes that can even come in pairs requires a longer spray, the player quickly learning some favorites and picking the two weapons they carry with them based on the availability of ammo, the weapons themselves, and which weapons will do the most work. Some high-powered options exist as well that are even more satisfying to use. The sniper rifle requires you to land a hit that requires a bit of good aim but rewards you with instant kills on most enemy types, the RPG is appropriately explosive and can devastate encampments with ease, and the grenade launcher spits out a projectile that’s almost just as effective as the rockets. Their ammo is limited heavily and enemies usually come in incredibly high numbers so you can’t just clear out all of them with your stronger tools, but they are an appreciated power trip when they show up. What is a bit more finicky though are the grenades you can toss. Their explosion radius seems a bit generous but inconsistent all the same. Enemies are smart enough to run away from them, sometimes making it clear and other times getting caught in the blast even though a foe who is equidistant experiences a different result from the blast. They’re good enough to use on occasion though, and since you can carry them for free on top of your two weapons there is no harm in using them, especially when they are outright required for destroying some machine gun nests.
Unfortunately, while we have these strong locations and satisfying weapon options, the enemies drag Black down to mediocrity. The first issue a player might notice is the consistency in landing headshots, enemies often having to be incredibly close for your crosshair’s suggestion that you’ve got the skull right in your sights to be true. If you miss their head, that’s where the real problem begins, as almost every soldier in the game has the same animation of reeling from a bullet wound that moves the already hard to target head around, and if you shoot them during the animation and score a body shot again, they might repeat that same animation again to keep complicating the shot. While the stronger weapons can defeat a foe with ease, the ones you fall back on most of the game will often trigger this animation trouble and show that many enemy soldiers can take plenty of shots from the likes of your machine guns, all while firing back with their own weapons. Health can only be recovered by grabbing it in the game world, meaning that when the game throws a large group of terrorists at you and they all start doing their bullet wound shimmy you’ll start seeing your health go down from foes who won’t go down. Medkits you use at your leisure mitigate some of this and the automatically used first aid kits are somewhat generous, but it’s the excitement of the firefights that really suffers from this design choice. You’ve got the tools, you’ve got exciting environmental destruction, and then actually shooting a person involves the awkward shuffles and slow kills. Many areas have a Kill All Enemies requirement for advancement as well, some of them slowly rolling out the foes to the point it can feel like the game is glitched and just not moving on. They do shake up which weapons the enemies are using at least and some even pack body armor or riot shields to encourage different approaches to taking them down, but many are just the basic unit but possibly with a different gun in their hand. Since almost the entire game is about shooting plenty of enemy soldiers, you unfortunately will encounter these issues often despite so many things almost working in the game’s favor, but while these do dampen the firefights’ potential, there is still enough quality to everything outside of enemy design that it doesn’t dip down into being outright dull.
Black does try to win you back by adding in extra objectives on top of completing the main forward progression. Based on your difficulty, you will need to complete a certain amount of secondary tasks to finish a mission and move on, but these are mostly simple things like finding documents or destroying safes. They do often have interesting descriptions when found, many being evidence of government secrets and cover-ups, but the secondary objectives are less substantial than they might sound. Finding them does require some exploration off the beaten path to further feed into the level design though which is a good thing, but the most obvious additional feature they could have added to elevate the game is missing: Black has no multiplayer at all. Despite the level designs being potentially great for multiplayer shootouts and the inevitable lack of bullet reaction animations meaning that aiming consistency would be cleaner in such a mode, Black keeps its focus on the campaign. Its absence is even stranger when you learn that the rewards for completing the game’s story on higher difficulties are special weapons that don’t serve too much of a purpose since they can only crop up in another single player playthrough. Black technically didn’t need such a saving grace to still turn out decent, but multiplayer would have allowed its strongest elements to really shine, and considering developer Criterion Games would mostly be moved back to developing racing games after this, it seems they never got the chance to fully realize the elements that almost worked excellently here.
THE VERDICT: Black’s great level design allows its gun fights to spread out in a way conducive to diverse tactical approaches and its weapons have a good feeling to them while feeding into incredible environmental destruction… but then you’re put up against plain enemies who react strangely to being shot and can drag out a level when sheer numbers pair with their mostly basic designs and AI. Without multiplayer to allow the technical design to flourish, Black instead relies on a short campaign that ends up feeling like a typical military shooter because the excellence in one area is harmed by mediocrity in another. Black could have been an FPS classic, but all the work to make the shooting satisfying is slightly undermined when it comes to what your bullets actually need to hit.
And so, I give Black for Xbox…
An OKAY rating. It is fortunate Black had so much going for it besides it enemies or it could have become a boring forgettable trendchaser during the military FPS boom. Instead, it ends up a huge missed opportunity, there being so much that could have worked in a multiplayer shooter. Even a single player only design could be greatly improved if it didn’t have enemies who revert to canned animations frequently and didn’t come in numbers that go from a good challenge to tedious as the game won’t let you move on until every one is taken down. Black achieves linearity in progression in an interesting way as your goal is always forward but the paths taken there are open to different approaches and strategies, and the fact so many fire fights end up more explosive than an action movie adds a layer of excitement to it all. The kick of your weapons and their strength can be great, but then they become less consistent as foes become bullet sponges or have their heads become impervious to the quick kill of a headshot. Black’s simple side objectives could have done with more creativity to them to make up for the gradual staling of the gunfights, perhaps doing things like motivating you to use certain weapons at times or featuring areas where the goal is something like a timed escape or destruction focused mission instead of just finding the right items.
The truth of Black is that so much of the development was put into the weapons, environments, and intermingling of the two that the plot has literally been said to be an afterthought and its clear enemy behavior was likely one too. It’s pretty much a classic case of having an extravagant tool you can only use for a basic job. You can make the most amazing, satisfying-to-use hammer, but it’s just going to pound nails like the rusty one with the worn handle next to it. Black needs a restructuring to complement its levels and weaponry, because without it, it slips into the morass of mediocrity many military shooters of the time found themselves in.