Black Preview

I recently got my hands on a demo of Electronic Art’s upcoming first person shooter Black and took it for a test drive. Read on to find out what I thought.

I recently got my hands on a demo of Electronic Art’s upcoming first person shooter Black and took it for a test drive. Read on to find out what I thought.

Into the Black

Electronic Art’s is promoting Black as having “Hollywood style” gun battles; and by that they mean that everything and everyone will explode given the right amount of bullets. The demo starts you off in a 2nd story room with all the windows being shattered by gunfire. When you try to exit the room, you’ll find that the door won’t open, so you’ll have to blow it off with your shotgun. This, I believe, sums up Black better than anyone ever could. The demo mission involves you blasting your way through a plaza, trying to reach your teammates on the other side. Your teammates are holed up in the middle of an intersection, shooting bad guys in the face. Once you reach them, you’ll help them shoot even more bad guys in the face, and then you’ll win. It’s deep stuff. The demo is incredibly short, as well as being timed, which I find somewhat odd.

Your standard first person control scheme is here, what with the crouching, zooming, shooting, and lobbing grenades. You’re able to carry two different weapons at a time, a trend popularized by the original Halo. The demo contains a pistol, shotgun, and AK-47, all of which convey a realistic amount of power when compared to their real life counterparts. You can also carry grenades, which will help in your mission to blow everything up, or whatever it is you do in Black. You can pick up health packs, which are scattered around the area. Each time you pick one up, you automatically store it, so that you can use it whenever you need it. Each health pack refills around 1/3 of your health meter. When you use one, your health meter slides back like the chamber on a gun, just in case you forgot how ridiculous the game is.

The AI, while not bad, isn’t much to brag about. Most times enemies will just stand out in the open while shooting at you, making for an easy kill. Occasionally they’ll hide behind objects, but often times you can just shoot the object they’re hiding behind until it explodes, killing them all.

For something that was hyped so heavily, Black is painfully unimpressive. It’s not "bad" in any sense of the word; it’s just incredibly average. The run and gun gameplay is something we’ve seen numerous times, and all Black does is add an extra coat of polish. The amount of destruction they’ve crammed into the game makes for a fun ride, albeit one that’s bound to get stale. And with a film market already over-saturated with Bruckheimer rip-offs, the balls to the wall action isn’t anything new, despite being incorporated into a video game.

With all of this said, I did have fun with Black. Hopefully the demo was just too short to show off what the game really has to offer, but something tells me that’s just wishful thinking.

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