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You’d think Midway would have learnt its lesson after the painfully flawed WWII FPS Hour of Victory bombed earlier this year. And for a while I genuinely thought they had. Action packed shooter Stranglehold is one of the most entertaining games released this year and Midway Austin’s Blacksite looked to be one of the more promising first-person shooters coming this winter. Things, sadly, don’t always turn out as you hope.
Blacksite sees you playing the role of a special forces soldier who battles against an increasingly strong alien threat – or at least you think they’re alien. It turns out that a program designed to end the need for new recruits backfired, and a race of half alien, mutated humans is formed. The government tried to cover it up, destroying the entire area of infection, but they survived. So, while you might come into the game thinking that you’re going to be fighting ET, for large portions it’s effectively guys that look a little worse for wear.
The game takes you to Iraq during the opening, before switching to Rachel, Nevada and eventually a military bunker where the enemy has set up base. It’s all very by the book stuff, with the almost obligatory squad command system, vehicle usage and on-rail shooter sections. The pure shooter gameplay that makes up the bulk of the game isn’t bad, it’s just completely and utterly samey. The proper aliens that you encounter make for some fun moments, but the variety on offer isn’t brilliant and the proper boss-like creatures aren’t the most inventive. The occasional set-piece wows, but not nearly regularly enough.
Squad control seems like it simply didn’t go through the stages of development that it sorely needed. There’s a squad moral feature that is intended to affect the way your squad performs, with high moral giving them a greater chance of killing enemies. The problem is that no matter what you inform them to do, they’ll regularly die, causing the moral to drop and their usefulness to plummet. You’ll also need to make squad members open doors for you, even if you could have done it yourself. The fact that the marker often won’t turn to something operable until after an unskippable in-game cinematic has finished makes this become tiresome very quickly.
On-rails sections that see you board a chopper and man a gun turret offer some genuine fun, but they’re pretty simple and present next to no challenge. Humvee sections are less fun, and see you driving while your squad mates make a feeble attempt at gunning down enemies. One section in particular sees you having to stop, get out the vehicle, gun down some exploding enemies, get back in the Humvee, drive on a few more metres and repeat the process, again and again. It’s simply bad game design, not helped by the Halo-esque control scheme that feels incredibly loose.
Blacksite uses the Unreal Engine 3 and for the first half-hour things look promising – if a little too shiny and glowing. But things soon become pretty dull, objects start to pop into view and the frame rate drops so low at times that you’ll think your console is broken. During the best sections in the game Blacksite does look good, such as when playing through the levels set in Rachel, Nevada, but for the most part it’s pretty generic stuff and the technical issues hurt a lot.
Destructible cover makes an appearance and helps bring the environments to life, but this is simply another area that suggests what the game could have been. Beneath its problems Blacksite is a decent shooter, but in today’s climate ‘decent’ just doesn’t cut it. The supposedly subversive storyline has its moments too, but will be lost under the weight of disappointment over the core gameplay.
You’ll reach the game’s conclusion within six hours too, and to top things off the final confrontation is nothing to get excited about. With all the things Midway could have created as the final boss, this must be put down to rushed development. Once it’s over there’s some replayability to be had from the Xbox 360 Achievement points, but it’s debateable if you’re going to want to go through the campaign again on a harder difficulty or to hunt out the remaining dossiers scattered throughout each level. Finishing the game on its default Hard setting doesn’t even give you the points for completing it on Easy, which seems like a pretty big oversight.
Online multiplayer is offered, but games online seem hard to find and online performance wasn’t all that smooth. It is an easy way to gain a few gamerscore points though, with about 70 being added to my score after one game. It’s hard to see Blacksite gaining a strong online following when the competition in the form of Halo 3 and CoD4 is so strong.
Blacksite has been released at a time when gamers have unprecedented choice in the first-person shooter market, and when games like Orange Box are losing out due to the strong competition, Midway’s generic shooter has little to no chance. Other than the odd set-piece, Blacksite has nothing to warrant recommending it above the other big hitters and some severe technical issues drag it down considerably. It was almost certainly intended to be a new franchise for Midway, but on this form who knows if we’ll see it again.
