Last year I played 2005's Area
51 by Midway Studios. It was a decent effort
for 2005 which led to expectations for Blacksite
that it could only be even better. Strangely,
despite the title this isn't related to the
first game at all. It's a complete standalone
title and mostly a different setting. Not for
the better and expectations were not met.
Firstly the game runs Unreal
Engine 3, so it's going to be hard to make a
game that doesn't look good. Levels are occassionally
well-detailed, although sometimes it can get
bland. Textures and art is average and there
aren't very many set-pieces throughout this
rather linear game. The main pro is that the
settings are a little different to a lot of
recent shooters - you spend a lot of time in
the American desert where Area 51 is located.
Large canyons and roads, deserted caravan parks
and a massive Area 51 base. The highlight of
the game for me was battling a giant octopus-like
creature that's straddilng a bridge while your
helicopter circles around it with you firing
furiously to take it out. Other helicopters
are doing the same. I normally hate on-rails
levels, but this was very epic, possibly the
best on-rails battle to date. Of course once
you get to control vehicles it's the normal
bad-handling rubbish.
So overall the game is helped
a lot by the Unreal Engine 3 and some of the
different settings, but from a purely artistic
viewpoint, it looks pretty average for 2007.
Gameplay is where Blacksite
really struggles though. You only get two weapons
at once, of which there's only really one weapon
you'll use throughout the entire game because
the rest are rubbish (apart from the mandatory
rocket launcher battles); and that's your standard
machine gun. You'll also spend most of your
time zooming in and attempting headshots, because
there's no quicksave and checkpoints don't appear
very often. Enemies go down quick if you can
make headshots. I only actually died in the
game a few times on the middle difficulty (which
they call hard). Even the final episode of three
levels I didn't die at all. The final boss is
possibly the easiest final boss in the history
of shooters. What I'm getting at is that Blacksite
is a fairly easy game. This isn't helped by
enemies that just stand around getting shot
at, which will be by you not your team-mates
since their AI is just as bad.
Just one main weapon, no quicksave
and only 4-5 different regular enemies (not
including bosses) make this a game you won't
be playing for it's gameplay. Nor will you play
it for it's visuals unless you're running out
of shooters as there's better looking game's
around.
Perhaps in this respect the
very short length of around six hours is a good
thing.
