Backside

A more appropriate title for this week's game, Blacksite. Or as Midway really wanted to call it "Six Gears of Rainbow War", but probably themselves realised that although they copied both games and mashed them together, they didn't do a good enough job to even get away with plagiarism.

And that, I guess, sets the tone for this review. Let me explain this whole plagiarism thing. First off, they've jumped on the recent bandwagon of making an FPS and immediately using the Unreal engine, rather than being, I don't know, unique. And fair enough, as anyone who's played Gears of War will know, the Unreal engine is quite good. But that by no means guarantees a decent game. That, I swear, is all the geeky, nerdy, technobabble out of the way. It's average drooling Joe Triggerhappy from here on.

An immediate comparison with Gears can be made: it's Earth, and weird aliens come out of the floor. There's also the annoying fact that the bullets appear to be at melting point in each game, which didn't bother me too much in Gears, but that was because there was a frigging chainsaw at the end of the gun, so I assumed the bullets were supposed to be superheated in some form of military strategy to deliver more hurtin' to those Locust scum.

Ahem.

The reason the glowing bullets doesn't work in Blacksite is primarily down to the fact that it's supposed to be present day with real, present day human weapons. There's also the fact that the game itself is so downright annoying to play. Other critics have criticised the game for being too short and having limited multiplayer functions. Personally, I'm glad it's short and I can't play it with my friends. I was glad I'd finished it, knowing I'd never have to play it again, and I like my friends too much to put them through it too.

By now you're probably wondering about the other random words I appear to have used as an alternative name for Blacksite. Try them the other way around. That's right, Rainbow Six. I liked Rainbow Six, even though it was the most frustratingly difficult shooting game - actually, it's probably the most difficult game, end of - I've ever played. That was fine though, it just made me certain there was no way in hell I'd survive 5 minutes in any form of military career, putting my lazy mind to rest knowing there was one more painful job prospect I could cross off my list.

The two simple feature remarkably similar to Rainbow Six in Blacksite are a), it's also an FPS (sorry, but I had to start somewhere), and b), it utilises point and click squad command. That's where the similarities end, although they could have ended before the squad bit because it's frankly, God-awful. And pointless. Midway tried to cover up how pointless this was by having a squad morale message pop up every few seconds saying whether your soldiers were having a jolly good time or not. Personally, if I was standing in the only wet part of Nevada, I wouldn't be too happy about it, let alone if I was being shot at by anything at all.

Commanding the squad, both members, is useless. If you tell them to go anywhere that isn't surrounded by allied tanks, they'll sure as hell come running back after a few seconds, bringing some new, heavily-armed friends with them. Should you be dumb enough to ask them to shoot an enemy, they'll probably be happy to do so, after they run back to the armoury as far away as possible, have a picnic, then spend a few days choosing which gun would be best for the job but also be reasonably fashionable. The only reason I bothered to give them a target was because it gave the victim a big red circle over his head, so I knew where the hell he was hiding.

Before I get too far into the mechanics of battle and everything else that's wrong with this game, I'd like to take a minute to tell you of my first impressions of this game. When starting the game, the only imformation you get is that you're either a soldier, a prisoner, a terrorist, of an odd combination of the three, somewhere that's probably Iraq. You only know this because you start off in the back of what looks like a shed, facing two American soldiers who aren't shooting you (which definately means you're not British), and for some reason there are two goats.

Actually I lie. There's a screen that says "Iraq, Three Years Ago" before you end up in this shed with goats and Americans. It turns out that despite this box being clearly made of wood with a floor made entirely of grass wasn't a shed after all, it was supposed to be a truck. Obviously things go tits-up and you have to start shooting people, but not the Americans, so you're probably an American too. That's about all the backstory you're getting sunshine, even if you read the instruction book, which for some reason tells you one of the soldiers plays American Football, probably in some closet-denial attempt regarding the size and shininess of his arms. Seriously. I didn't notice until about half way through the game that my character was called "Piers". Then when I looked back at the book it was "Pierce" these dim-witted morons were trying to say.

Next was a simple observation, but is it just me, or is overly-muscular-probably-in-the closet-guy-with-beard voiced by the same guy who did one of the dubs for Vegeta in Dragonball Z? If it was, he sure as hell wasn't proud of it, seeing as no one bothered to put it on his Wikipedia page, or the Blacksite page itself.

And this final first impression is that everyone in the game seems to be imiting some kind of weird aura (which supports my Dragonball Z theory, incidentally), which had me worried that the twist in the story was that I'd actually spend the last few hours shooting angels and was working my way up to Jesus himself.

Enough of that, back to the terrible squad command thingy. One thing you'll immediately notice is that, although you probably wont remember his name, your character is totally inept and needs his good chums to press every button and open every door for him, in a similar relationship between a mother and her baby. Who's drunk. Which one's drunk? Both. It's something to that effect, trust me. As such, you never get to enjoy the simple pleasures of most FPS's, which is setting high explosives, then choosing when to make them go big-badda-boom. This left me calling for Vageta (as I spent the rest of the game calling him because his real name was so gay) to plant explosives for me. This was a mistake because it took him 10 minutes to get back when he'd done, I suspect because he was busy tripping over the massive erection he got from playing with bombs.

Somewhere later on in the first "chapter" (as all games are determined to call them, because apparently it's not cool for a game to have "levels" anymore) Vegeta made some references to Star Wars and the Death Star while we drove through... hang on, what the hell were flood controls doing in Iraq? You know, the chase scene in Terminator 2... the bit GTA San Andreas ripped off in a suprisingly witty manner? No? Philistine. Anyway, literally 30 seconds after these references, I came across a big sign with (seriously) "Tatooine" written on it. At that point I left the room in disgust for a few minutes.

Speaking of disgust, Blacksite is home to some downright shameful advertising with Dodge. The second vehicle you see in the game is a Dodge... as are the five conveniently stuck in traffic directly ahead of it. I mean, obvious Dodge's. Big, new, horrible, chuncky things that aren't going to be anything else even if you slapped a GreenPeace tarp over them. And I know Dodge advertised in Crackdown too, but the adverts were in actual billboards. Billboards that turn into scoreboards when you look at them. This is something very different. After all, I remember Crackdown using a phrase such as "...and it's about to hit the fan", which gave me a cheap giggle, having pictured that scene from Aeroplane! as soon as I heard it. I swear, the following is a very accurate line of dialoge from Blacksite:

"Quick, get behind that car. Damn! A Dodge Avenger! This thing's brand new!"

I immediately shot my comrade for that shameful piece advertising in an attempt to remind him that the big ugly aliens are the priority right now, partially because they were shooting at us with sniper rifles, mostly because no one wants a Dodge that isn't a Viper.

Next, we get to the part of the game that highlights it's biggest frigging flaw. Two things are universally accepted as "not fun" in any FPS. 1) Dying. 2) Infinate respawning enemies. These are two things that occurred a lot in Blacksite, always going hand in hand like a newly wed couple with a penchant for getting under my skin. In fact, just like any newly wed couple then.

When playing an FPS and put in a situation in which everyone is shooting at you, the sensible thing to do is to take cover and take your time changing the odds with Ol' Killy in your hands. At no point is it ever a good idea to cheese it to your goal when it's surrounded by enemies with big guns, then start worrying about defending yourself. Should you use that tried and tested tactic on chapter 3, you're going to be playing Blacksite for much longer than anyone ever intended, should you actually bother sticking to playing at all. This simply because of the unlimited supply of pain from the side of the corner you can't see while cowering in a pool of your own urine.

I would also like to mention that Pierce once decided that 3 seconds before a checkpoint was a great time to have a heart attack. Having just killed the last of the big bad aliens between me and my goal, he just died on his own, leaving me to plough through the blasted mess of aliens and the aforementioned pain.

Now, I'm being cruel to Blacksite, so I guess I should pay it its dues by giving it a well deserved award. So, Midway, if you're reading, I present to you "Marksman of the Year Award". I know, I know, it's still early in the year, but you deserve it for Blacksite. No other game has ever been able to show me an enemy with the ability to shoot me, with an assault rifle, from half a mile away, through a fence, some trees and a few layers of American pickup truck in the face. Congratulations, you vicious bunch of b******s.

I did learn, however, from Blacksite something about America I've never known before. And that is that American suburban houses are really really big. I mean, even playing as a trio of 6ft something marines, I felt dwarfed when I entered a family home, only to find the ceiling... somewhere up there I'm suprised my eyes could focus on.

Swiftly back on track, Blacksite has a really annoying feature, wherein it will reset you to your default armourments (excluding grenades, because they're pretty useful) after every blackout. Yes, blackout. Not checkpoint, or end of level. It occassionally get's bored mid-level and decides to warp you to somewhere more interesting you probably don't want to be.

My final two bones to pick with this game are the horrendous framerate issues (sorry, technobabbe again), which I can honestly say are worse than any other console game I've ever played. Then there's the fact that due to some glitch at the end of chapter 3, manly man Somers (pronounced Summers) decided to thank the guys for saving him by giving us all what looked like a pole dance in the helicopter, because he sure as hell wasn't sitting down.

The most annoying thing about this game though, is that it's not really as bad as I thought it'd be, having played the demo. Yeah, it's annoying. Yeah, the "advacned AI" promised turned out to be in reference to how much pointless messing around your team mates can get up to rather than helping you. But it does manage one principle of FPS games. You're not a superhuman. So on that basis, you're not going to fly through the game having never spilt a drop of blood. That said, however, I strongly recommend against buying this. Don't even rent it. See it in the shop, look at it like it just fed you sour milk, and walk past.