Loud guns? Check. Pushing the Xbox/PS2 to the limit graphically? Check. Lots of automatic weapons with rewarding sound effects? Check. Robust single player campaign? Check. The game makes you feel like Rambo and it deserves a sequel? Check and check! Black may seem like a generic shooter, but don't label this game as a generic if you haven't played it yet. This game is all about intense action and explosion. It could be labeled as a mindless shooter, but it's not really. Black is easily the best and last LAST GEN's first-person shooter.
The story isn't the best, but it's quite engaging. You play as J. Kellar who's a sergeant first class in the special Black Ops team. What do the Black Ops team do? Well, they are trained to the highest level in psychological warfare, espionage, or anything related to military stuff-they're pretty much the advanced version of marines. They're main duty is to swore and protect the U.S. from any threats. You're in this room and being interviewed by this man. You'll tell him everything what you did to catch this guy named Lennox-the man you're trying to chase. Lennox is the leader of this terrorist organization called Seventh Wave. Why are you chasing him? His group did a city attack on Veblensk and now it's an all out warfare between the Black Ops and Seventh Wave. The story's very interesting thanks the cutscene, but in most of the time when you're playing, it feels like the storyline is just kind of there just to give you a reason why you're shooting these soldiers. Overall, it's decent, but I would like to have more back story.
The game had beautiful explosions!
GET OUT!
The sound are all awesome. They were all taken with extreme care. Every weapon sound awesome and voice acting is top-notch. Who ever designed the sound effects for the weapons should really do it in more weapons. He/she did a good job to fit the strength of the weapons too. For example, the Uzi has this loud and deep sound and it does a crapload of damage at close range, but inaccurate. The AK-47 would be moderate in terms of loudness, but it's one of the most versatile weapons in the game. During the cutscenes, I feel like I was watching some kind of dark action movie and the voice acting in the cutscenes are mostly gritty and dark. So expect to hear a lot of that in cutscenes. In gameplay voice acting, they're pretty much solid. It's similar to Half-Life 2's or the Halo game's voice acting. Graphically, this is amazing for 06 on last gen. Black pushed both Xbox and PS2 to the limit and it looks fantastic. Great textures, lighting, and everything looks nice and not blocky.
Look what I did with my M16!
More explosions!
During the development of Black, it was labeled as an FPS game with "Gun Porn" elements. Black easily delivers on the gameplay. The game's pretty standard first-person shooter fair. You can only carry two weapons, you can swap them, you can throw grenades, melee, etc. What makes this game so different from Halo, Call of Duty, Half-Life is that this game is all out blowing sh** up and wrecking havoc in a somewhat unique style. For example, you can actually throw a grenade in the sky and shoot it and it'll explode or there was a moment I had when I was trying to enter some building and the door exploded, I just ramed in the door and took down like 8 marines with my Uzi-that was a Rambo moment right there. There are quite a bit of destructable evrionments too to give you that hectic feeling of the game. The game has about 15+ weapons and most of them are automatic, a couple of pistols, shotguns, and the rocket launcher is the best gun in this game. It has a really awesome sound effect when you shoot it or when it explodes and it reloads fast too. The game uses health packs and medikits to regain your health bar. Black does have regenerating life like Halo, but it only works when you're really near at death. Also on higher difficulties, all health packs are gone. Health packs are basically like medikits, but you can use them whenever you want to. Not only that, you have a bit more objectives to do kind of like the Perfect Dark games. Black plays a lot like a run and gun game. It's very arcadey and unrealistic, but it's so fun. I had a lot of fun fighting like 12 soldiers at the same time all by myself. Not only that it features objectives that you have to do or else you won't complete the mission. There are some very awesome moments in the game too. One of my favorite moments was where you get to use your rocket launcher for the first time and you have to destroy this 50-70 ft tower and since this game features destructable envrionments-it was being destroyed pieces by pieces. That was one awesome experience and Black will deliver some more of those moments. Most of the time, you will just get your self into a lot of intense fire fights in this 7-8 hour campaign. The game doesn't really have any multiplayer, but the single player should offer enough fun for everyone. The enemies are mostly soldiers and they all have different roles so if you're expecting to see some very different enemies, prepare to be disappointed cause you're just fighting terrorists most of the time. The AI is quite dumb, they're not really up to par with games like Halo, but you will be fighting them in big numbers and they can be tough at times. The game features checkpoints to not ruin your experience by constantly loading and saving, but some of the checkpoints are quite bad so you have to play it cautiously at times. Another quicknote is, there are some similarities with the old Medal of Honor games. You're basically stealing intels or required to destroy a certain item and most of the time you'll be alone or have 1-2 soldiers with you. So if you're not really into the newer Medal of Honor games which has CODized, maybe this game could justify your need. Keep in mind, this game's a lot more frantic in the gunplay department than the MoH series will ever offer.
Black is possibly one of the most funnest action games I've played and it's very chaotic. Criterion Games also proved that you don't have to make New Gen games to be successful since Black is last gen and it can definitely offer some competition with Perfect Dark Zero, Call of Duty 2, or some other new gen FPS games for 06. If you just want to play a game that doesn't tell you to do too many things, but shoot, Black is a game you would not want to miss. 9/10.
Doing my job, causing havoic.
Bodycount will be the spiritual sucessor to Black.
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