Blacksite: Area 51

I generally will try to be as fair as possible when I review a title and base my review on a complete analysis of the title in question. However, in Blacksite: Area 51 - I can sum up most of the game in a single word: Crap.

Now, I don’t choose this lightly, but the issues with this game are so numerous, so incredibly annoying, and so impossibly upsetting, that I could barely register a positive aspect of the game (Even now, I’m struggling to think of one) but, let’s break it down and explain my feelings.

Gameplay: (4/10)

The gameplay for Blacksite is so bad, that I feel gracious giving it a 4/10 for a rating. Why? Why is this so horrible? First and foremost, let’s look at the genre of this game: First Person Shooter’s. Now, there is very little to base your first person shooters on besides Graphics, weaponry, and if there is a squad element, then tactical command ability as well. I cannot stress this enough people: If you are going to have a game be a First Person Shooter, please give me a variety of weapons to use throughout the game. Blacksite: Area 51 has a grand total of 6 main weapons throughout the course of the game….6. 6 weapons? 6?! You get an M16, a Pistol, energy Shotgun, Energy-rocket launcher, rocket launcher, and sniper rifle. Yes - that’s it, ladies and gentlemen, 6 full weapons throughout the game - which, considering it’s only worth 4 hours of gameplay before you beat it, is probably not a horrible thing…but still, 6 weapons in a first person shooter? Makes for a rather uneventful title. As to why I specifically stated “Main Weapons” - well - there is a grenade that you can pick up in the game - just one type of grenades that explode really pretty, destroy a lot of the environment, and often times do the damage you expect from a grenade, but…I have some pretty serious problems with grenades that I will address in the graphics section.

Now - another major thing about FPS’s is that you must pace the game properly. If you are going to have enemies that are deathly accurate even if you jump, crouch, or strafe, then please give me a chance to move from cover to cover without getting shot three times. At one point in the campaign, you are running through a Drive In parking lot with snipers on the other side, moving from car to car for cover. But - Blacksite lacks a very important detail: no sprint function! So you feel rather stupid as you run along as fast as you can from car to car, weaving, jumping, crouching, etc. - but cars are so far apart from one another that you get shot at -least- twice between each vehicle, and the snipers are -always- accurate. My original thought, when I found that the distance was so great and I had no sprint function, was that I could perhaps lay down a surpressive fire on my enemies to get them to lower their heads and stop firing - but enemies seem entirely oblivious to the concept of “Surpressive fire” and simply stand there while bullets zing around them or pierce their bodies keeping a bead on you and sniping you more.

Which brings you to the next element of the FPS: Variety. Yes - we already discussed the weapons being severely lacking in their variety, but the enemies seemed to have been severely lacking too. There was a basic iraqi soldier at the start of the game. Then, there were the reborn - soldiers that had been genetically altered. There were a few different models for the reborn but they all basically behaved the same - the only major difference was the weapons the carried - M16, Energy Shotgun, Sniper, or Energy Cannon. Enemies never carried Pistols or bazookas. Then, there were your creepy-crawly-explode-on-impact-with-player-or-bullet enemies that scurried towards you making a particular noise as they moved and then lept at you when they got close enough and blew up in your face. Then there were the walkers - reborn infused with robotic legs that made them taller and gave them the ability to use mounted weapons on their shoulders. Sometimes they would come out in groups of two or three, but they were hardly challenging and provided little increase in difficulty to fight. There were your basic marauding mutants that charged senselessly at you under a barrage of bullets and rarely managed to actually get to you. There were your mid height alien creatures that came out of spore pods and rushed at you to attack, often times stopping to jump randomly over a particular element in the environment like a bus or overturned car in order to give you even more time to hit them. There were the worms that sprang out of the ground and shot balls of…..something at you that could be detonated by shooting them before they hit you…and…lastly there was the giant omniscient turtle-creature that shot a beam of energy out at you from its face…you face 2 of these throughout the game. So, without counting the “variation models” as different creatures (because often, they acted exactly the same and didnt use their “variation” ability - which was a ranged attack where they used projectile vomit to hurt you) you had a total of 9 Different enemies (counting the spore pods that launched the mid-height alien creatures out). 9 enemies, 3 of which were barely used (The iraqi soldiers and the turtle thing and the walkers) while the rest were entirely over used in most cases. The Crawly things often came at you from random, unknown areas, so suddenly out of no where you hear that sound and start spinning looking for them only to be pounced from behind by one and hurt - a lot. Otherwise they were used as a “landmine” during the driving sequences, which brings me to the next flaw.

Now - I know that First Person Shooters have long been trying to get vehicle sections in them and get them right. Ever since the counterstrike days, when people would put rideable shopping carts in the maps or go-karts that you could run your foes over with, but that decreased your framerate drastically and handled like crap, there have been attempts to put good driving sequences into games. Some games have done it right, but other games do it really, really wrong - like Blacksite. When you get into a car in blacksite, you are shifted to a 3rd person view. Left Analog stick to accelerate (forward or reverse) and right analog stick to turn the camera and steer the vehicle. Steering is done in such precision that it’s anyones guess why they even -bothered- putting a handbrake control in, which slows your car down but does little else for you. Then, often times you have to go offroading in your vehicles - which is fine, except that as your driving, creepy-crawlers will pop up and charge the vehicle. Normally, they are easilly dodged and avoided, because the car turns on a dime, but at random times a rock thats just slightly too big (like, the size of a human fist) will catch your car and instantly decrease it’s speed, slowing it down drastically and allowing them to catch up. Then, there are the many many ramps that they put into the game, which are neat…yes - My car can go over ramps, thats fun. Except that there is no level plane getting up onto the ramp (so your car slows down like it hits a huge rock) and then the car almost always lands improperly on the ground (slowing down drastically like it just hit a huge rock…) so you find yourself driving a rather jerky, obnoxious ride - no matter how you try to control it.

So let’s explore a potentially redeeming factor - the squad based commands. Blacksite tries to make it easy on the player by incorporating squad based commands that are context sensitive and so, single button based. You tap the “use” button and your squad will do whatever action it needs to do - breach a door, enter a code on a button panel, mount a turret, etc. So whats the catch? Squad commands are limited to a very short range - by the time you can order your men onto a turret, you can be on that turret yourself (and you are far more accurate). Giving an attack order is basically like saying “Thats a bad guy, mmmkay?” to your squad - they hardly even focus fire on that enemy and there is hardly even a time when it’s even necessary anyways. Breaching a door? If I have to be so close to it to tell them to breach it, then why don’t I just do it myself? I can kick in a door too, y’know…at least - I should be able to. Move-to commands are nice, but it seems a lot of events are triggered only when you (the player) moves into the area. So you send your squad ahead, about ten feet, and then they say “all clear” so you start forward - five feet later, hell breaks loose, a huge ambush crashes down on you, and you’re the center of attention.

Which is another downfall for the game - Rarely, if ever, do the enemies focus fire on your allies. It seems they understand fully that you are the player - and therefore, if you die, the game is over and they have won. There are a few times when they will fire at your squad instead, but it’s so very rare that it’s of little importance. Even if you come up behind them, they will almost immediately turn around and start firing on you instead. Omniscience, ftw.

So -is- there a redeeming factor in the Blacksite gameplay? I could potentially say that they pace ammo drops well, but thats a lie - they are so frequent throughout the game that there is almost another ammo drop after every single firefight - with a box of grenades and a crate or two of ammo, just in case you miss a lot in your 450 M16 rounds. (Perhaps there -is- a good reason to not have a sprint button)

Graphics: (5/10)

You know, Graphics in First Person shooters is pretty basic - you have guns, tracers, explosions, bullet impacts, and scenery and animations for various actions. So why is it that so many games can’t seem to get it right? In Blacksite: Area 51, Explosions are pretty, graphics on the models are ok - but one of the major problems I found is that all the enemies and allies seemed to have a soft sheen to them - like they were soaking wet all the time. This highlighted them and made them easy to target in any given scenario, but it made them look stupid as well. Then there was the scenery - which was about as much to look at as a big, neutral colored wall. Sure there were trailer homes, nice lighting / shadow effects in some cases, things like that - but most of the scenery was bland desert ground or bland desert rock or bland concrete bunker or bland neutral-colored homes. The most excellent part of the graphics was when you went through a suburb area and you entered a new-home construction site. All the wallboard and drywall and insulation could be shot away leaving the walls as just standing lumber, which would pretty darn cool. But thats the best part - most everything else was just blah.

Animation wise, the game got nothing right. I mentioned earlier that I had a pretty serious problem with grenades? Well - Grenades are great, explosion wise - and the destructable environments make for some really exciting explosions. Thats probably the redeeming factor of the graphics genre. But the problem with grenades lies in the throwing animation. Why? If you press and hold the grenade button, you “cook off” your grenade (A fast 3-4 second count before its ready to explode as soon as you let go, taking you with it) but there is no animation to show this. So you press the button, hold it for a second, release it, and then your arm is shown moving forward with the grenade coming out. Is it too much to as for that you lower your hand, grab a grenade, stick it near the camera, make the sound of the pin pulling, and then get to throw it? Yeah - it takes more time in combat, but it would look great and it would be realistic. As it stands, it took me a while to realize that I was cooking off grenades without ever pulling the pin when I pressed that button.

Then there is the shadowing effect. There is a part in the game where you are running towards a door, and a semi is pointing it’s high-beams at the door. I wouldnt have noticed, had there been no shadows, that there were no shadows - but instead, everyone had a shadow -except- me. It was a little disappointing to say the least, that they had put in such a great lighting system and utilized shadows so well for everyone except the players avatar. Tsk.

And finally, there were the unbelievable moments where you would turn a corner and everything would be black - and then 5 seconds later, the world would start filling in - or the game would break to load the next area at random - no story arc, no important moment, just a black screen with the word “Loading” in the middle and then five to ten seconds later it would pop up with the game again. What the hell is that? I’ve not seen that sort of occurance in a long long time in games…it was surprising, and disappointing.

Audio: (4/10)

So - I had hoped to say that Audio would be a redeeming factor for Blacksite - but I simply can’t. When walking up a staircase I could suddenly hear bullets wizzing past me. I turned about and saw no sign of it. So I continued up the stairs where I was going. As I stepped into the next room, I saw only one source of gunfire and the sound of the bullets wizzing by - a soldier (ally) on the balcony outside, which was sealed off to my access and was on the other side of glass. Yet somehow, the game was registering the bullets were close enough to me that I was worthy of being “whizzed by”.

But that’s not the extent of the bad audio - Music is non-existant in the game, characters make generic comments. Perhaps the biggest disappointment though was that the game gives a lot of story dialog at certain parts in very quiet tones from the characters. Even standing right next to them, with the voice volume cranked and all the other volume down, you -can’t- hear them speaking! You miss out on so much story because of this, that it falls into both that category and the audio category.

Perhaps the only redeeming factor is that, when your troops decide to be loud and say something, it’s normally a comical moment based on the setting (like when you walk into the drive-in-theater concession stand and one of your guys go “hey Pierce - Maybe we can get this nacho machine working…heh heh.”) but I just question what the designers were thinking making the audio so damn quiet that you cant even hear the storyline hardly at all.

Replay Value: (3/10)

Unless you want to go through the game a second time to listen to the story that you missed because of the bad audio, or collect the hidden dossier on the enemies/allies that your with - I wouldn’t probably subject myself to the torture of playing through it again.

Story: (2/10)

Alright - now there will be a little spoiler in this part, but hell - if you still want to play the game for shits and giggles anyways, go for it - I won’t spoil too much.

There are certain cliche moments in games and movies that you really don’t like seeing - and Blacksite has a number of them. Primary example: In the Armed forcers, there is a saying that is “Leave no man behind”. It’s used in many movies and games, but in the cliche of many titles, it is broken in order to give the story a good villain. Such is the case in Blacksite - and it’s so predictable that it hurts. The real problem though, is that in many games, you know that such-and-such is a villain, but you don’t get that confirmed until late in the game, the climactic part of the storyline. In Blacksite - it happens almost immediately. In the first mission, you lose one of your men, leaving him alone (Alive) in a room. In the second mission, you find him, wounded, 3 years later, in a totally different location, and in the third mission, right at the beginning, he betrays your team and reveals that he is the leader of the bad guys (not that you didn’t expect that already but…). It’s bad enough to contain the cliche - it’s even worse to exaggerate it so heavily like this by making it immediately obvious.

Next - why does it seem like you and the main villain are the only ones that remember how screwed up the first part of the game was? There were alien creatures attacking you, yet when you see them again later, your men are so shocked and amazed by it that it’s stupid. “Wow! What the hell are those things?! Some sort of Biological IED’s!?” Yet they fought the same creatures a little while ago in the first part of the game…strange.

Another Storyline Cliche - Why do you always fight through hordes and hordes of enemies, just to get into the final battle with the boss, who locks himself behind a nearly invincible shield in a big reactor room that you have to strategically destroy specific parts of in order to access the bridge to get to him. C’mon, guys - cant we think of something better than that? You move from platform to platform, past giant lasers, shooting small conduits, then rush up onto the middle of the platform and have the epic shoot-out with the boss - who you basically unload round after round of your weaponry into while making small sidesteps to avoid his fire. In the end, you kill him, and the final storyline cliche hits - the cliffhanger. “Now, let’s go see how far the damage has spread” and the game ends as you fly off into the sunset in your chopper with the only surviving member of your “team” who wasn’t even a member of your team and - from what I could get of the story when the audio wasn’t screwing it up - is some sort of doctor partially responsible for all this.

Which brings me to my last reason to hate the story - you hardly know what the story is! So much of it is in the dialog that either takes place in quiet voices during firefights, quiet voices in the middle of noisy ambient rooms, or whispers that you can’t even hear regardless of how quiet the place is.

Conclusion:

If you want mindless shooting of alien-like creatures, buy Halo 3. Blacksite is the sort of game I cant even reccomend you rent to try - but hell, if you want to, go ahead. I’ve seen other people give it far more gracious reviews, but in much less detail than I have gone into - I dont think it really is worth the time or effort of standing up to put the disk into your console - but one thing it was good for was reminding me how awesome other FPS games are.

Overall Score: (3.5/10)

“Blacksite: Area 51″ is copyright 2007 by Midway Games

Tags: 360, Area 51, Blacksite, Xbox