Guns. They're seemingly everywhere in video games. Some games do them justice, for want of a better word, depicting them as miniature death-dealing cannons. Other games just don't care. One end goes bright and the enemy looking at it falls over.
After some successful Burnout racing games, Criterion Games got to work on putting as much effort into firearms as they did into fast cars. Or perhaps it's better to say 'as much effort into the effects of firearms on the environment, as they did for the effects of a fast car
The result is Black. Just simply Black.
Fun Times
I'd like to say I was firing up Black on my PlayStation 2, but that won't be the case for the foreseeable future for any PS2 game I've got on a disc. I can emulate it, though, and after a few minutes of staring at a black screen with some soundbites and music in the background, Black finally loads into a full-motion video montage of newspaper headlines and scenes of violence, delightfully warped and skewed by visual effects that I just can't describe. Bad VHS? Dated televisions? Eh, it's not important.
What is important are the words that are soon to come out of Jack Kellar's mouth. Under interrogation, he is asked about the Seventh Wave, a terrorist group of some description that he was tasked with taking out. There was a survivor, or some orders weren't followed or something. It's hard to know for sure. No subtitles to follow, and lots of imagery to get distracted by left me with more questions than this interrogator.
Keller agrees to open up and tell his side of the story, which happened just four days ago, and will serve as our first level of Black, a first-person shooter from developers more familiar with third-person racing.
The first thing we do in Black is to pick up a shotgun and use it to blast open a door. Don't know why we couldn't kick it open, or shoulder barge it, but we're taught that guns have multiple uses in this game - assuming you come across a closed door with a shotgun.
A lone target with his back to us is our introduction to the more traditional use for a shotgun. I'm quite sure that I've overdone it with a shot from this range, but I am a CIA operative who works off the books, as I gather, so I'm sure none of this actually happened.
Favouring an AK over a shotgun, I switch weapons and walk into some gunfights.
You'll notice a few things when playing Black. If you're on my setup, you'll notice a spot of emulation slowdown and some controller sensitivity that results in gameplay that tends to the slow, awkward side.
If you're playing Black as intended, you'll instead notice that this game doesn't do what other shooters do. Black takes details that other games ignore and shove it in your face. Bullet cases get ejected from your weapon in other games, sure, but not into your face, and they don't often stay on the floor after the fight either.
Muzzle flashes are commonplace but are not always unique to each weapon. As I meet up with Black Cell, encircled by terrorists, we see even more attention to detail that Black wants to put front and centre.
Reloading is vital, obviously. Games do reloading in lots of ways. Gears of War just made it a minigame. Counter-Strike shows us some elaborate animation. Black literally makes you focus on the act of reloading, the rest of the screen blurring away, no matter what's going on.
In any other game, you'll use those few seconds of reloading to keep track of your target and make sure you're ready when there are rounds available to shoot. In Black, you're using those seconds to make sure you put the magazine in the right way, presumably for immersion. I've never been a gunfight, nor even shot a gun, but I imagine I'd be focusing on the contents of my hands in any reloading situation, and nothing else.
There are moments of downtime to assess the situation, and a crouch button to get out of the way to reload, unlike standing in front of a terrorist like me, and it's these moments where you can see that Black is as detailed in the environments as it is in its arsenal. Bodies line the streets, fires burn away, an awful lot of bullet holes march across the walls, but it's not over yet.
When I said that the developers paid attention to the effects of guns, I meant it. Fighting inside results in dust and smoke almost filling the room as the walls fall to bits. A lot of the environment is destructible, perhaps not to level-changing amounts, but enough to make you feel engaged.
Couple the visual effects with the weight of the controls, and you start to take the game a little bit slower. You don't want to rush through the stage because you don't want to get shot and fumble with the sticks to return fire. At the same time, it feels great to keep hold of the trigger and blow everything up.
It's not realistic, but it's not cartoony either. It's Hollywood. Even the vehicles explode.
As we march through the streets dealing with incoming fire by returning it with more of our own, I start to forget my objectives. What am I doing here? Just shooting things?
Uhhh... good? Not even sure what I did. I just walked up here after killing some terrorists. I walked around the corner and the level came to an unexpected close.
Blimey, those stats look particularly poor. I had to do one secondary objective before finishing the level, which I did by unknowingly walking over a subway map. Where on earth were the other objectives? At what point could I have branched off the path to find them? I'm going to need to perk up for the next level.
Another FMV advances the interrogation, and therefore the plot, but I still couldn't really follow it. This time, Keller had a conversation with an American mercenary that he doesn't remember, on account of an RPG hitting the building he was in at the same time. He also moans that a map wasn't accurate, which is the basis for this second level: crossing the border.
Frustrations
You're given a pistol with a silencer for this mission, so you'd imagine that you need to stealth your way through this forest. Black doesn't have a minimap to give you any hints of where enemies are patrolling. There are no visual cues for something lurking nearby except for whatever you can physically see on your TV screen. That happens to be camouflaged terrorists in a forest at night, so good luck.
The crouch toggle will allow you to squat down and move painfully slowly through the level, but it appears to do nothing to help hide your presence. In fact, with no way of knowing whether you're hidden or not, navigating this forest feels like a bit of a crapshoot. With enemies that have two states, unaware or very much aware of you, you might as well just go loud and hope for the best.
When the time came to move carefully and quietly, I was immediately spotted anyway, and all hell broke loose.
All the enemies I encountered in the forest dropped AK ammunition, thankfully, for it was all I had to influence the battle in my favour. I was desperately low on health, and to be honest, I'm not entirely sure how the health system works. I don't think it has any regeneration, as I was hunting for health pickups to stop the audio cues warning me of impending doom. At the same time, however, I am sure I was taking hits and still staying upright.
Further Fun Times
Finding a route through the checkpoint - by blowing a hole in the wall - all those quibbles disappear as you're rewarded with the spectacle that is Black in mid-explosion.
When it hits the fan in Black, it hits the fan. It smashes the fan to bits. Fire, dirt, smoke, everything just erupts. Walls disappear, glass smashes, vehicles have no hope and turn into yet more explosions. The action is punctuated with pauses, but as soon as someone spots you and opens fire, it all kicks off again and looks fantastic.
You don't always get a chance to look, but the ragdolls get into the action too. Limbs flail, but more often than not it's the dramatic falls from a height that you'll spot, as your targets inexplicably smash through the watchtower railings or unexpectedly fall through holes in the floor.
I spot a safe sticking out from its surroundings but don't know how to interact with it. The D-pad is used to switch between your two available weapon slots, as well as apply a med-pack or, as I just discovered, change the firing mode of your weapon. More detail that I supposed we should expect by now.
I also find the grenade button.
Turns out I have secondary objectives. I do wish that I was told of them beforehand. Maybe they're in the menus I don't read. There's no mission briefing before you're dumped into the level, so you must just be expected to explore your surroundings. I found nothing in the forest - not that I was looking. Hopefully, I'll find more at this checkpoint.
I don't know what they were, even though they flashed up on the screen when I destroyed them, but a couple more secondary objectives ticked off, I was lead to the next part of the level. Crossing a canal. Because crossing a border isn't good enough for Black.
You might have to squint to see it, but this terrorist's ragdolled arm went a bit manic for a split second, stretching the bounds of realism. It's the first visual hiccup I've seen in Black, owing mostly to not really being given a chance to look out for them.
Anyway, onwards to the canal. I'm sure there are stealthy ways to get to the other side, but I know what works and I've no problems sticking to it...
Fantastic. We've gotten through a forest, crossed a border, crossed a canal, all by our lonesome and attracting minimal attention *cough*. Where could we go from here?
A farm? Our level is going to conclude on a farm? Or will it continue with something even more incredible than a farm? Time will tell. And speaking of time, these levels feel quite substantial, both in terms of size and content. Nice.
Further Frustrations
Sadly, emulating Black can result in one rather annoying bug where your character sticks in place and refuses to move. You're not caught on scenery or anything, but without a jump button, you wouldn't be able to do much to wiggle free anyway. Your only hope is that you have enough grenades to kill yourself (which, on Normal difficulty, took me three grenades aimed squarely at my own feet to accomplish) or to quit and start again.
But there are checkpoints, right? We crossed the canal just seconds ago. It's not like we've lost much progress.
I stand corrected. Note to future self: save state often.
Final Word
I had only played Black for just under an hour, and even with the slowdown and clumsy controls - all self-inflicted, I hope - it was an experience that I'm thoroughly glad I finally got around to. I'd heard of Black back in the mid-2000s but wasn't fully on board with it, for whatever reason. My interests must have been elsewhere because it probably would have been something that I looked into further, had I looked into it at all.
But I didn't, and fifteen years later I knew Black as 'that game that really cared about its guns' and little more. Add on a bit of gameplay, and I know enough to know that I want to play it some more. Not for the story - I don't know what's going on. Not for the sluggish gameplay, that I'm sure I can tweak. No, I'd be playing more Black because it's a really short game full of cinematic gunfire and explosions.
It's like a stretched out tech demo. A proof of concept. In some ways, it's amazing that the PlayStation 2 could pull some of this stuff off, but I think that's just because I wasn't aware of what Black really looked like before playing it - and it is something you need to play, rather than look at.
You could watch it in an afternoon, I suppose, but that's not as fun as picking it up and setting off those explosions yourself. The Burnout series made crashing fun, perhaps more so than the racing they offered, and Black is similar. It's not trying to be the best first-person shooter out there, it's just trying to be one of the coolest. The most stylish, not in character or setting, but in the fireworks and the effects, and it's worth deciding for yourself if it succeeded.
Fun Facts
The rumble of the controller will mimic a beating heart when you're close to death. I wonder if you can feel that over the rumble of an entire magazine of bullets being sprayed out the business end of your machine gun...
Black, developed by Criterion Games, first released in 2006.
Version played: PlayStation 2, 2006, via emulation.