These days it almost seems like if it's a sequel, EA's either making it or buying the rights to the studio so they can make the sequel to the sequel. Well, apparently EA is aware and a little bit annoyed by the conception, so in an interview sometime last year, they said they try to make at least 1 original title a year.
Some years that ends up being a licensed game, but this year, the stars align, and you get an original game based on an original property. (I know...what are those crazy guys going to think of next?)
Story
You're Kellar, Jack. You're part of some CIA group that performs Black ops. He's not performing any ops right now, as he's currently doing some R&R in a really dark jail. Apparently, some people weren't happy with your methods, and are suspicious of your recent activities.
Kellar is given two choices. Cooperate with the investigator who claims to be his last hope for seeing external light, or stay in your cell for good. Now, there's no doubting that Mr. J-dot-Kellar is a hard-ass, but he realizes that if his memoirs are ever to played out in video game form, he's gotta cooperate so he can get out and meet up with some game company executives. He agrees to play ball with the investigator, and starts telling him how he met "the Fourth Man".
Gameplay
I hope you like shooting, because that's all you can do in this game. Much like Burnout is a driving game with a nearly aesthetic focus on crashes and explosions, Black is an FPS predicated on shootouts and explosions. Tactics? Useless. Puzzles? Just clutter to prevent you from getting from one shooting sequence to the next. Jump button? Please. Real soldiers (and all but the most advanced warfighters) don't jump.
R1 is shoot. This is the most important button in the game. All other buttons are some function of the gun, with the exceptions of L2, which crouches, and R2, which throws grenades. Left joystick moves Kellar, and the right joystick aims Kellar's gun. (The one that's for fighting, not the one for fun.)
You can only hold two weapons in Black. This is important to note when you come across some cool looking gun that you might want to try out. If you like it, will you have enough ammo to finish the level with it? Will you be able to find another gun to use if you don't? That's about the extent of the strategy you'll have to employ during the course of this game.
Scattered throughout the levels you'll find blueprints, laptops, and safes that contain random pieces of intelligence. None of these in particular are needed to complete the level, but you'll have to complete a small number of the secondary objectives to proceed. The game will keep mentioning your progress on these secondary objectives, to stave off the potential embarrassment of reaching the end of the level, only to realize you couldn't proceed until you picked up another piece of data, or blew up another laptop.
Lots of things explode in Black. It is not, as some early reports claimed, a game with fully destructible environments, but if you shoot the right thing with the right gun, most of the time, something's going to change.
Graphics
When everything isn't exceedingly dark, it looks pretty nice. The huge explosions and showers of glass are an unrealistic, but entirely fun touch. Busting up surfaces, whether it be huge stone pillars or shower tiles is satisfying both viscerally and visually. The level designers do a pretty good job of giving you new and interesting looks to the missions, and you don't see a lot of places in the game that you'd mistake for areas you'd already visited.
The developers seem to take a exceptional amount of care in modeling the guns, which is why each reload action has an almost excruciatingly long animation before you can shoot again.
The ragdoll physics on the enemies are fun, though they do makes for some awkward situations on explosions and such, ending up embedded into walls.
A lot of the game ends up being exceptionally dark, though. It makes it really hard to see. In addition, in those dark areas, often times, it seems like the lighting has gone wonky, as a corner of the wall will be lit, but nowhere else in the vicinity.
Still, even with the quirks, this will go down as one of the Playstation 2's best looking games.
Audio
The voices work pretty good for the most part. Someone got lazy and wrote a lot of gratuitous cussing into the last third of the game, but for the most part, the actors hit their marks, and they're a complement to the game's story, rather than a detraction from it.
The sound effects team did their job well, too, ramping up the sounds of the gunfire and explosions to pair well with the visually intense explosions and gunfights that make up the majority of the game.
My only complaint with the sound in the game? The music. It pops up at inappropriate times, and seems like it's not quite right for the game. This isn't stuff for a spy/secret ops game. This music would be more suited for a gung-ho type shooter. Admittedly, this is what Black turns into, but its counter to the mood the cinematic scenes and the level design is trying to create.
Gripes
This game is short. We're talking, you, a friend, and another friend could all beat this on a one-week rental without watching each other progress through the game. I don't honestly care that this game doesn't have multiplayer, but 6-8 hours with dubious replay isn't "purchase" material in my book at $40, ever. Maybe $25. The game offers no depth, and no replay value. I beat the game once and unlocked the silver guns, guns that don't run out of ammo. Woo hoo! Same levels, less challenge! People replay the Metal Gear Solid games because with those abilities because they can then use them to mess around with all the other little extras and easter eggs that the MGS team included in the game. What extras did you guys on the Black team leave in there? Nothing. It's pitiful for a game to reference "Setec Astronomy" and be guilty of having too FEW secrets.
The AI in the game isn't going to be winning any awards. You've got a handful of enemy types, and they all are just basically clockwork pieces. To reinforce this idea, at one point in the game, I an ally NPC try to maneuver into position. Because I had advanced past a certain point, the game told the Allies to move to the next position. One of my allies started meandering over to his spot, while nonchalantly running straight into an enemy NPC who was standing there, I believe trying to run to a position to fire at me. I sat and watched while my ally ran up and eventually into the enemy, and the collision pushed the enemy NPC off its spot so my ally could run to its assigned position, all the while completely ignoring the enemy NPC, as the enemy NPC did likewise. I then blew away the enemy NPC. If the bad guy's got a shotgun, he'll rush you. If he's got a different ranged weapon, he'll close to set distance, and you can stun him with single shots until he dies. If he's at an extremely far distance, he won't even move the whole time you're shooting him. The level designers work around this mostly by having you encounter the enemies around corners and in tight spaces so you'll be forced into a confrontation quickly, and won't notice their deficiencies so easily. While you're in close quarters the game's really intense. When you're not, it's not. Maybe if they get to make a Black 2: Bigger and Blacker or Black 3: Black Ebony (“It's always darkest before the equinoxity.”), they'll also make the enemies not stupid enough to hide behind the exploding instruments of their own demise, or at the very least, make sure they don't shoot said objects while they're standing behind them.
What's with the non-skippable cutscenes? Are we in the world of PC games from 1991 again? Where's the loader, then? That's just unacceptable. That's right up there with not allowing people to fast forward through the studio logo on DVDs.
Then there's the story. You can't make a whole game entirely consisting of stuff that happened in the past. I'm sorry. That's just lame. It's almost as bad as the, "and then I woke up...turns out the events I spent all this time making you care about were all a dream!" ending to a movie/episode/TV series. The entire game feels like an episode of Alias, only without the parts of the show where Sydney is concealing her ongoing double-cross and having the requisite romantic moments for the episode. This is fine if you haven't watched more than 2 episodes of any J.J. Abrams series, but if you have, the game's plot is as defined and linear to you as any of the levels. By the time Point A is defined, you know exactly where and what Point Z is.
With that in mind, the game's ending doesn't really help, either. It's just about as unsatisfying as Halo 2's ending is. Much like Advent Rising, another game that was rumored to be a trilogy, the cliffhanger ending completely cuts the legs out from under what little momentum the story had built up and makes future prospects seem dire.
Overall
While it's nice to see EA supposedly stepping outside their vanilla confines, it'd be better if they didn't just trade their vanilla confines for someone else's. How about giving us something original next time that doesn't comply to another game's every cliche?
My final opinion? Just a rental, despite what Alex Ward would have you believe. You can't ship a game that's under 10 hours long in this day and age without multiplayer and real unlockables and just expect gamers to go out and plunk down $40 for it. It is a fun 6-8 hours? Sure. Will you ever need to play it again? Very, very unlikely.
"Gun-porn" turns out to be the most accurate descriptor anyone slapped onto the game. I mean, how many times can you rewatch the same bit of pr0n before you're completely unstimulated by it? It's intense for the first experience, but completely diminishing returns every time after that. That's not something I can recommend you slap down $40 for.
