Blacksite: Area 51
Review
Plenty of run 'n' gun action to find here
by Zkylon
reviewed on PC
Gameplay
Blacksite sends armies of creatures your way with an array of diverse enemy types that never manage to bore you. What’s more, when the Xenos start to get repetitive, a new type appears. After you get used to that new type of monster, you run into Reborns. Then, it’s Reborns and Xenos at the same time. This reminds me of the masterful enemy handling that Valve or Bungie have in their games.
The Midway crowd did their homework, studied their competitors and managed their assets in a marvelous way. In the end the most fun you'll find in Blacksite narrows down to the crazy parts when one giant worm comes out of the earth and the situation is limited to you, your team, the giant bug and the mutated humanoids that try to murder you every chance they get. Shooting down beasts of that size or squads of mutated insurgents without minding team morale or commands is Blacksite's finest.
To extend the 10 hours or so the game lasts there’s two other difficulty modes to try out. You can also collect dossiers; pieces of data about monsters, characters, locations and weapons that are scattered through the levels. They aren’t very hard to find but may take more than one run to find all of them. The multiplayer side of the game features four different game types with the regular Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch and Capture the Flag. An addition is Abduction: basically Team Deathmatch with the catch that every player on the human team that gets killed turns into a Reborn. The thing is, it’s near impossible to find an online match and it isn’t really worth the trouble.
Motion sickness
Big trouble comes to Blacksite when you try to change its settings which in the console version aren’t as troublesome as in the PC version. There are little to none settings in Blacksite and the game apparently doesn't save them so you have to reset them every time you boot the game. Other difficulties include the incapability of tuning the options during game (it has to be done in the main menu), changing several key options like quicksave or more importantly squad orders and the lack of an option to turn subtitles on. The most important of these flaws, however, is the aforementioned absence of advanced graphical settings. The options are limited to resolution, antialiasing, texture filtering and dynamic shadows, which leaves out the option to tweak HDR, motion blur, particles, shadows and such. As you may have figured out already, it leads to really poor performance. This is one of Blacksite's major weak spots that brings to light the lack of polish the game suffered in this particular area. The amount of motion blur this game has is dizzying and how bad the game fares isn't proportional to the graphic quality the game provides. Sure, the game does look great, but which game running on the Unreal 3 Engine doesn't? With the amount of games using the same technology, over muscled men with weapons start to get repetitive and Blacksite doesn't stand out from the crowd as Bioshock did. Also, in some levels huge glitches occur and all the textures turn black, forcing you to close and restart the game. Other glitches like floating weapons, disappearing objects, and a pink and green line on the right side of the screen are common and aplenty and are heavily disturbing from the constant gun fighting.
All in all
In a nutshell, Blacksite has a short, fun single player experience with major flaws on the performance department but worthwhile if you just want some run 'n gun action. The plot subtly digs into some present topics concerning the United States and while it has some of the gameplay to back those puny details up, the technical problems suggest you put the game to rest and play something else. This game is definitely a good rent if you have a great machine and you already exhausted everything Crysis, Call of Duty 4 and all the other worthwhile shooters can provide you.
7.0
fun score
No Pros and Cons at this time
