Blacksite

Don't Die Hard

With careless enemies, an absence of gun recoil and an over-generous health system, it might well be some way through the second episode before you even come close to dying. To say that Blacksite is a challenging game would be a lie as big as the one about this being representative of a next generation shooter. Even on the middle difficulty (deemed 'Hard') you'll barely flinch.

And if the so-so opening episode with its ludicrously easy 'boss' seems a tad ordinary, the second is far, far worse, thanks to some truly awful driving mechanics. Placed at the wheel, you accelerate with the left stick and steer with the right, and wonder who on Earth thought that this ham-fisted system was a good idea. You might get used to the wobbly handling in a few minutes, but it feels about as natural as Jordan's boobs during a jog. Now and then you'll be forced to get out and negotiate with some tentacled aliens to clear a road block, but in the main it's a case of simply driving as fast as you can and trying not to steer in the path of those annoying exploding gits that pop out of the ground. Avoiding giant fireball-spewing worms is fine, but through a mixture of cheap game mechanics, bad luck and terrible handling, you'll die a few boring deaths before you get it right. But then all that's left is a succession of truly mediocre levels, full of samey, middling combat, over enthusiastic dialogue and uninspiring and overly linear locations.

The game tries to spice things up with some on-rails sections set in a chopper, as well as some meaty boss encounters, and for a brief period there's a sense that Blacksite could have gone onto deliver increasingly intense scenarios against an overwhelming enemy. But no sooner do you dispatch these monumental enemies, it's back to the dull, dire routine of seeing off perfunctory enemies with low hit points and even lower artificial intelligence. For a game put out as a flagship, full-priced offering it's not really acceptable, and, somehow, isn't even as engaging as the rather undervalued Area 51. Certainly, as a piece of conspiracy pulp fiction Blacksite falls flat on its face, which is the very least of its worries, sadly.

Unreality

Given that it's the Unreal Engine 3 behind it, we at least expected the game to wow technically, but sadly that's rarely the case (unless you're only looking at the great stills). Not only is the frame-rate permanently in the doldrums, basic techniques like dynamic shadowing are handled absolutely horrendously in Blacksite, with the kind of wince-inducing chunkiness overlaid on otherwise pretty detailed character models. All manner of other jarring glitches and weird shimmering constantly trouble the texturing, and the amount of pop-up and jaggies on show make you wonder what kind of tortured development process lead to the game being allowed out of the door in such a painfully unoptimised state. Factor in the often bland, lifeless, linear environments, the inherent repetition in the enemies and a ludicrously short single-player campaign, and it simply feels like a game that was booted out of the door way before it was anywhere near finished. There's genuine talent not being given a chance to shine with this game, and we're quite sure there are plenty of frustrated individuals connected with this near-miss project.

Of course, we could tell you how much Blacksite has been rescued by amazing, innovative online multiplayer, but that'd be the biggest lie of all. It does what it does, with a routine checklist of modes including Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, Capture the Flag, and Abduction, but nothing it does hasn't been done far better in dozens of other titles. Worse still, the mooted co-op mode for the single-player campaign was ripped out, while modes like CTF suffer by only offering two maps out of the available eight. Not only that, the multiplayer is online-only, and supports a mere ten players at once. Whoop. The Abduction mode is perhaps the only one to offer anything interesting in that you have to try and stay alive to remain human, or hunt down the humans as the Reborns, but it'd be clutching at straws to suggest that this rescues the game from its other sins.