BLACK
They don’t make them like this anymore… or at the time
A war that has lasted the majority of my life ended last week and my British compatriots are losing their minds at the withdrawal from Afghanistan and Britain's slide into being a ‘second rate power’ - maybe these idiots need to organise a seance with Anthony Eden. So anyway, I ended up playing BLACK - a game released in 2006 on Xbox & PS2 by Criterion Games - a game that in many ways is a little taste of early forever war aesthetic and of early 00s first person shooter design.
First things first, BLACK easily has the most obnoxious opening / first time user experience of a video game I can think of: A rather long (and unskippable) opening credits sequence wherein individual credits appear and fade out very slowly to eventually fade into a FMV video of a standard set up - Soldier guy is getting interrogated in a dark room by gruff authority figure and has to recount the actions of the last few days, and thus is the framework that our missions take place within is established. I don’t think this setup was as much of a cliche at the time in 2006, but revisiting this game in 2021 after having played through a fair few games with this exact same structure (Black Ops, Battlefield 3 and Blood and Truth) this framing device feels super cheesy, shallow and dated today. And if you quit at any time before the game allows you to save, you’ve gotta do it all again (more common than you’d think with a toddler running around your house!).
So what’s going on?
There’s a arms dealer/terror cell called 7th Wave. They are real bad dudes and killed some CIA spies, and you, a real bad ass Black Operator is going to hunt them down and kill their leader - a US Black Ops guy who has gone *too far*. The game takes place in the Caucuses, across a whole suite of grey brown hell-scapes, such as city streets, factory districts, sewers & asylums with hundreds of faceless goons to dispatch along the way. So what makes BLACK stand out and still get referred to warmly by some as a game needing to be brought back in some form? It’s all in the visuals.
For a game that ran on the PS2 BLACK is one hell of an achievement in terms visuals alone. The level of effects and just sheer stuff going off on your CRT television was a technical marvel given the equipment it was running on. BLACK got a 10 out of 10 by official PlayStation Magazine UK which for me is as shameless an attempt as any to over assert the game and the PS2’s fading relevance in 2006 when Call of Duty 2 could be had in your own home months earlier on Xbox 360. BLACK ‘rivals’ Next Generation visuals and is an all out assault on the senses we are led to believe by the critical consensus of the time.
When replaying BLACK this weekend, I think I was going to be a lot more positive about the game, and to be fair, I find the visuals really charming. Every old school art trick is deployed to give the game a unique look, fake shafts of light can be found everywhere, destructible objects and a really impressive amount of VFX. Weapon models are chunky, detailed, possess strong audio and exaggerated animations, compared to contemporary console FPS’s at the time and indeed of that generation it compares very favourably. However I’d have confidently asserted that BLACK came out in 2003/4, not early 2006. Now theme park ride style FPS’s were yet to be perfected until Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare came out some 18 months later, but we were already well on our way with games like Medal of Honour: Allied Assault and Call of Duty. It seems weird to me that BLACK, while aping the A to B to C structure of a Medal of Honour level fails many fundamentals established over the early 00s.
Objectives and where to go next doesn’t read very well in most cases - for all the effort to fake more sophisticated lighting found in video games on PC or next Gen. BLACK’s levels can look rather flat and grey, obfuscating the path ahead which is often ‘highlighted’ in contemporary games of the time by using tactically placed light sources and composition, or as a failsafe, using UI (waypoints, a map etc) something that BLACK doesn’t use either.
This coupled up with the way the beat to beat gameplay is delivered makes for a bit of a bewildering experience, the in-mission objective updates and events have a real disjointed “and then what happened was” from moment to moment. Everything is delivered in distorted radio voice ‘Operator’ lingo and events often have no pre-amble or lead-in. Again, if this game came out a few years earlier I think I’d be more generous, but given that this game came out in the middle of the 00s and on the eve of the apex of the FPS theme park ride format in Call of Duty 4 I just don’t think the game held up. But maybe I’m being too harsh here, it is Criterion’s first FPS and I’m sure it didn’t have anything like the budget of Call of Duty or Medal of Honour had. But I think these issues feed into the gameplay and vice versa to make for an underwhelming experience.
‘Gun Porn’ - one of BLACK’s calling cards and USPs - these guns look loud, sound loud, cause extravagant chain explosions and yet have a time to kill on par with 1993’s Philadelphia. I’m not surprised critics’s senses were assaulted as they are hit from all sides as they try and down a single grunt with the firepower of ED-209 to no avail. Magazine sizes are inflated - AK-47s with 60 round magazines, G36-Cs with 70 round magazines, such an odd balancing decision - just make the enemies easier to kill. They are already as dumb as a bag of rocks, make them more disposable - lighten the tone and increase the action movie bombast this game should excel at. No, a hockey mask & tracksuit wearing slavic street fighter stereotype should not be able to absorb 40-60 rounds of assault rifle ammunition. It doesn’t feel empowering and detracts (least in my book) the feeling of these guns feeling powerful and exciting. That’s what Gun Porn should be all about right? (I’m not even going to try and address how cringe the term ‘Gun Porn’ is, sorry).
And it feels like for a couple different decisions made by the team and the money men, the game could have been more Cannon films and less Tom Clancy-esque tacticool seriousness, there’s some goofy as fuck humour to be had in the secondary objectives “Destroyed videotapes marked Bohemian Grove" but its severely at odds with the presentation elsewhere. But Marketing and Publishing probably felt that that wouldn’t sell, and thus BLACK is a dead single entry property in the EA stable. It did get a spiritual sequel in ‘Bodycount’, I remember playing the demo for that once. And that is the extent of what I remember about that game. Raycevick did a deep dive into that (and BLACK) on YouTube and it’s worth checking out.
So do I recommend revisiting this game? Nah, unless you have an interest in early 00s FPS shooter design, there’s some seriously anachronistic design at play here, which in its own way was a bit endearing to me. Like, actual enemy closets and alcoves, completely featureless and no obvious purpose of means of entry. Oh and RPG countersniping. But it is sobering to remember that this game is a full five years younger than Halo 1(!). If you do end up picking this up off of Gamespass or dusting off your own copy, do yourself a favour and whack it down on easy and blast through it - you’ll have a lot more fun that way.
