Criterion Games, the company behind the dramatic car disintegration in the Burnout series, is the developer of Black, a first-person shooter, decided to extend the same principle to military weapons, industrial facilities, and pretty much anything unlucky enough to get in your path because destroying cars wasn’t enough. So, the shooter is noisy, filled with explosions, shooting, and crumbling scenery. At first, it’s a blast.

You take on the role of Keller, a highly skilled soldier being questioned by a government agent. Through flashbacks, the eight missions in the game expose your role in an operation against Lennox, the commander of the Seventh Wave, a terrorist group that deals in weapons. Sadly, the story hardly uses well-known military jargon, dark conspiracies, and top-secret activities. Everyone has communicated through government documents and cigarette smoke for the past 20 years.

Although the questioning structure offers a handy justification for connecting the missions, you could question whether the game has unintentionally skipped a mission because the final confrontation is very sad and comes with so little ceremony. Even Rambo: First Blood Part II is aware that an action film must have a satisfactory conclusion, ideally one dramatic. However, Black obviously places more emphasis on gunplay, and once you start pulling the trigger, its attraction fair.

The first thing you’ll notice is how amazing everything appears. Criterion’s experience with Burnout is probable. Both games recognize that, when given with sufficient visual and aural excitement, it can be fascinating in and of. In Burnout, pricey cars ostentatious mounds of scrap metal. Here, the same idea holds for explosive barrels, trucks, buildings, and anything else that can be converted to rubble.

Bullets rip through concrete, explosions light up entire rooms, and objects explode into debris clouds. The game pushes you to use the surroundings as an extension of your arsenal instead of just eliminating the soldiers in front of you. When a perfectly explosive device is sitting next to each opponent, why spend ammunition firing them all?

Perhaps the most distinctive feature of Black is its concentration on spectacle. By Guy Debord’s concept of the spectacle, warfare turns into an audiovisual performance, to be consumed through appearances and visuals. In a sense, the player is both the director and the audience. The battlefield is a stage, and the adversaries are actors. The game wants you to take pleasure in the fireworks.

Additionally, James Der Derian’s thesis of the military-industrial-media-entertainment network, Black transforms fighting into an approachable entertainment product by fusing Hollywood action movie clichés with the well-known visuals of military operations. The real draw is its spectacular explosions, but its armaments, radio chatter, and operational goals provide the illusion of legitimacy. It is more focused on making military brutality appear incredibly exciting.

Luckily, Black offers a variety of well-known weaponry, such as shotguns, assault rifles, submachine guns, and specialty weapons. You can aim any weapon down its sights, so you can try the headshot or take calculated rounds at far-off adversaries. Nonetheless, aggressive shooting is typically preferred over intricate tactical play. Enemies drop supplies, ammunition is abundant, and there is rarely a good need to preserve bullets.

Although adversaries have an unpleasant tendency to flee once a grenade is tossed, they are nonetheless valuable. Fortunately, you can shoot them to destroy them early. It’s a very simple solution. Just shoot the explosion yourself if your enemies won’t cooperate.

Regretfully, despite their appearance, the weapons don’t feel all that distinct from one another. Range and recoil are the main differences between them, neither of which produces very intriguing choices. Assault weapons like the G36C, MP5, AK-47, and M16 are typically more effective than the Mac-10 or Uzi because many encounters entail firing at enemies from a distance. The shotgun has a similar issue in that you can’t get near enough to take advantage of its stopping power.

Similar restrictions apply to the rocket launcher and sniper rifle, which are limited to certain areas. Sometimes the latter is a giant key: grab it, take out a few strategically placed obstacles, and go on. Unfortunately, the guns don’t offer more variance in use for a game whose title screen virtually fetishizes the mechanical beauty of weaponry.

Ian Bogost’s theory of procedural rhetoric explains how the rules and mechanics of video games convey ideas. Games can convey meaning through the behaviors they promote and reward. The theme in Black is simple: armed conflict is the answer to every issue. When enemies show up, you shoot them. When a car gets in your way, you blow it up. A fortified position hinders advancement by destroying whatever is holding it together.

No intrinsic flaws, Black doesn’t waste time attempting to be a military role-playing game or tactical simulator. It recognizes its targeted appeal. Soon, its dependence on devastation gets monotonous. The placement of explosive devices makes them appear to exist for the player’s entertainment at times. Virtually, an atmosphere that puts up a neon sign shouting SHOOT HERE is not the same as one that promotes it.

The eight missions take you through industrial complexes, military installations, and war zones featuring concrete buildings, hallways, and catwalks. Although they have a pleasing appearance, their layouts never add enough mechanical variation to make each mission unique. Fortunately, there are exceptions. Another experience is fighting through a shower area that appears to have escaped from Die Hard 2, while fighting through two minefields offers a change of pace.

Unfortunately, things are made worse by the enemy’s artificial intelligence. When you’re in close quarters, soldiers will sometimes put up a good fight, but their actions are rarely believable. You can kill another soldier who is standing close by, shoot someone through a window, and find that the other hasn’t seen anything out of the ordinary. It seems that his afternoon is not disrupted by the sound of automatic gunfire and multiple missing coworkers.

It’s not always better to smash a window behind an adversary. Leaving a stack of dead soldiers along a patrol route is also inappropriate. Enemies move between bits of cover, duck down, and expose their heads in ways that make them simple targets once combat starts. Your AI-controlled friends aren’t much better, finding it difficult to keep up or becoming stuck in monotonous motions. Along with the narrow range of adversaries, the opposition is quite unsatisfactory.

Black comprises auxiliary tasks the main goals, such as finding or destroying particular things. Although they are necessary to finish some difficulty settings, these are barely very engaging. Most of the time, you’ll find items that are loosely hidden, get a quick alert, and keep shooting. However, some findings are humorous, such as allusions to Cold War espionage, military technology, and vintage action movies. Others, which include intelligence files, surveillance photos, classified operational documents, and reconnaissance maps of enemy facilities, are based on current political and military concerns.

These allusions, which draw from the national security concerns and conspiracy theories prevalent in early 2000s popular culture, give the game a marginally intriguing identity. Regretfully, one of your more noteworthy activities while taking part in an international military operation is gathering allusions to imaginary government conspiracies. You’ll have the chance to stop that, so don’t worry if you’ve ever been concerned about Burnout‘s proprietary rendering technology ending up in the wrong hands.

Black continues to be one of the more striking shooters on the PlayStation 2. The lighting is superb, featuring glare, ambient illumination, and realistic sunsets. The industrial settings provide a plausible backdrop for the action, reload animations appear realistic, and weapon models are baroque. The biggest draw is, of course, the explosions, which fill the screen with smoke, debris, and flashes of light.

However, there are restrictions. Certain destructible items feature noticeable seams that show which areas of the surroundings are meant to blow up. It’s hard to ignore how artificially convenient these are once you figure out the pattern, similar to discovering that any handy item is most likely a part of a trap when watching Tom and Jerry. Usually, though, it is a fuel tank that is about to blow up.

Additionally, there are sporadic frame-rate reductions in the PlayStation 2 version, especially during intense firefights. When the screen gets really busy, they are not enough to spoil the experience. The PS2 release is still a remarkable technical accomplishment, but the Xbox version typically operates smoothly. The absence of blood is one odd omission. Although there is a lot of gunfire, swearing, and explosions, there isn’t much feedback when you shoot enemies, like Criterion was able to achieve with so much realism.

Perhaps crucial to the experience is the sound design. Bullets hitting concrete create convincing effects, gunfire has a gratifying weight, and explosions make a massive boom that fills the room. The action is complemented by an orchestral soundtrack that sounds like it would be from Con Air or another high-profile Hollywood movie. Black doesn’t aim for subtlety, and the soundtrack does a fantastic job of supporting the film’s cinematic goals.

The voice acting is not as effective. A large portion of it is communicated via radio, and part of the speech sounds loud. For example, Keller appears intent on speaking into his radio during the second mission, though he is purportedly attempting to keep quiet. When your character is determined to announce his presence to the entire building, it’s hard to take clandestine operations seriously. However, these are only minor issues with a game that sounds great overall.

Sadly, the campaign should be completed in about six or seven hours by seasoned first-person shooter players. Although its main distinction is the elimination of health kits, which makes it more difficult, higher difficulty levels provide some motivation to return. Black Ops mode and silver weapons with limitless ammunition are also unlocked when finishing the game. Nevertheless, there is minimal replay value, no multiplayer, and no other game types. There’s not much more to learn once you’ve had the key interactions.

No question about it, Criterion creates a first-person shooting experience that looks, sounds, and amazing by applying the fervor of Burnout. Its explosions are amusing, its weapons are fun to shoot, and its audiovisual presentation is still one of the game’s best features.

However, Black also illustrates how spectacle may become a constraint when the underlying experience is unable to keep up. It is unable to develop into the outstanding shooter that its technical presentation first indicates due to its repetitive encounters, unreliable enemy AI, limited weapon variety, uninteresting story, and brief campaign. The game’s mechanics, which involve identifying a target, pulling the trigger, watching the environment disintegrate, and then moving on to the next spectacle, make military combat enjoyable.

To be honest, there’s nothing wrong with wanting a shooter who can blow up half of the neighborhood. There are moments when all you want to do is grab an assault rifle, kick in a door, and reconstruct an industrial building into an extravagant fireworks show. Compared to most games of its generation, Black has a spare understanding of that. It just doesn’t have enough concepts to last very long. It’s an incredible explosion. Shame about the diminishing firepower.

References

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  • Breuer, J., Festl, R., & Quandt, T. (2011). In the Army Now: Narrative Elements and Realism in Military First-Person Shooters. In Proceedings of DiGRA 2011 Conference: Think Design Play.
  • Criterion Games. (2006). Black [Video game]. Electronic Arts.
  • Debord, G. (1994). The Society of the Spectacle (D. Nicholson-Smith, Trans.). Zone Books. (Original work published 1967).
  • Der Derian, J. (2001). Virtuous War: Mapping the Military-Industrial-Media-Entertainment Network. Westview Press.
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