BlackSite: Area 51 - Review

Added November 29th, 2007 by Kenneth Rathburn

Back in 1995 a little light gun game by the name of Area 51 was available to play in arcades. This game never really left too much of an impression on the gaming world. Ten years later, another game under the same name came out for the Xbox, PS2 and PC which gained a bit of attention for itself. Now Midway has brought us their vision of the infamous government location and it’s gotten a good bit of praise from the early previews. But can this latest incarnation of the Area 51 franchise manage to leave a lasting impression or is it just another first-person shooter that will be forgotten by the end of the year?

BlackSite puts you in the boots of a US soldier simply identified as Pierce who serves as yet another dead silent, emotionless videogame character. The game starts with you and two of your squad mates bringing Hell to an unconvincing adaptation of Iraq. After about an hour of uneventful shootouts and traversing, the game tries to up the ante by tossing in some otherworld-like beings at you. The rest of the game takes place three years after your little Iraq raid yet characters treat it as if the events happened just days ago. Over that time lapse aliens have been popping all around Nevada; your job is to neutralize any threat that comes your way.

The plot of BlackSite is one of the game’s many faults; it just fails to be anything other than average and forgettable. We’ve seen the story about government conspiracy and the possibility of extraterrestrials being tested in underground bases in numerous games and movies. Unfortunately for BlackSite, it doesn’t manage to do any better with its story. On the other hand, it doesn’t do any worse either. The only interesting parts of BlackSite’s story are two of the plot twists, but other than those brief moments there’s basically no substance to be found in the story.

But plenty of games have had lousy stories and turned out to be really good. Just take a look at the Tom Clancy-based games. So surely BlackSite has enough strong points to look past the mediocre story, right? Well, this isn’t really the case. Let’s start with the gameplay, which is so painfully basic that it’s easy to assume Midway put minimal effort into making that part of the game stand out. The only things that really add anything to the gameplay are the occasional vehicle segments and the use of so-called squad commands.

With the vehicle missions, the controls are clearly derivative of Halo, too bad there’s barely anything other than just driving in those sections. To pull you out of the experience even more, the vehicles control very unrealistically and almost as if you’re skateboarding. As for the game’s squad commands, they couldn’t be any more bare bones. You can tell your squad (usually made up of two) where to move. They will travel in a very Rainbow Six Vegas-like fashion. Good luck with making them get there quickly. About the only use your squad will prove is during some parts in the game wherein you’ll need to ask them to specifically take down a door. As if you couldn’t kick down most doors yourself. Other than the occasional vehicle mission and door opening command about all you do in BlackSite is walk around and kill alien hybrids. Ultimately, the game’s strongest aspect is that the controls are easy to pick up, learn and adapt to more or less thanks to how overly simplistic everything in the game is.

Now, this normally wouldn’t be much of an issue if the game itself was fun for the action alone. But once again, BlackSite can’t fulfill even this bit of potential that just about every videogame has. Perhaps the one feeling that’ll likely come to most that play this game is boredom. It just feels as if the game’s lacking anything to help spice it up. It’s way too easy to be put off by how unimpressive the game is. This isn’t to say that BlackSite is lacking so much that it makes the game horrible; it’s just that it lacks enough to make this a simply unremarkable experience.

What’s odd is that the game remains a relatively dull experience despite a fair amount of scripted moments that could make your eyes pop in awe. And truth be told, there are a few moments in the game that are likely to make you sit back and say “Whoa” to yourself. But even these eye-opening moments don’t amount to much with every other aspect to the game feeling average at best. It doesn’t help that the game starts out almost completely devoid of any real entertainment and doesn’t begin to show improvements until you’re about half-way through the single-player. The game does slowly manage to become more entertaining as you progress into the second half, but the later levels are also filled with the bulk of the game’s frustrating moments. There might not be very many parts in the game where you’ll become aggravated, but they certainly stick out like a sore thumb. Fortunately, BlackSite does manage to function as a shooter, even if that isn’t enough to make it a particularly entertaining title.

If you’re wondering just how much you’ll have to be put through in this game until reaching the end, it’s not much. There are a total of six episodes in the game and each take about an hour, but some will be shorter than others. The game itself comes out to being four to six hours long. For those that remember Gears of War’s difficulty, BlackSite’s are laid out very similarly. Three difficulty options are available (Yellow being the lowest, Orange being medium and Red being hardest) with the medium difficulty saying it’s intended for shooter veterans. But truth be told, the Orange Level difficulty should be your choice, unless of course this is actually your first time playing an FPS or you’re just not good at these games. And it must be said that the game has quite possibly one of the worst, most unsatisfying endings this year in games.

As far as replay value goes, it might as well not exist. The single-player portion in BlackSite is likely to leave a bad enough impression on you that you’ll just want to ignore the game right after that. But there is an online multiplayer portion, though it doesn’t really offer much. There are a few maps to challenge other gamers to in one of four multiplayer modes. Unfortunately, this barely manages to be enough to even consider the game for a competitor against some of the other multiplayer shooters released this year. And to add insult to injury, the game only has support for up to ten people, which is laughable in comparison to the sixteen plus player cap in games such as Halo 3 and Call of Duty 4, both of which have more modes and maps than BlackSite. Basically, BlackSite only earns itself about five or six hours of “game time” thanks to the single-player and offers little to no replay value in either the multiplayer or single-player.

As I mentioned earlier, the game’s strongest aspect is how easy the controls are to pick up. Well, this can only be said since the game has only two aspects that manage to stand out among the mediocrity that plagues the game. Other than the controls, the best part of the game is its technical proficiency. While this isn’t the case with every part of the game, there are a few situations that the Unreal engine is put to good use in BlackSite. For instance, there are several sections throughout Episode 3 that show a good bit of effort was put into the game’s visuals. There’s a decent amount of destructible items in the game that the player can mess around with, but the game’s several scripted moments are what make this most apparent.

However, like just about everything BlackSite manages to do well, something holds it back. With the graphics, it comes down to three major aspects. The first being that the load times in the game take a considerable amount of time. Dying in the game will reward you with having to sit through load screens that just drag on and on. Another issue with the game’s visuals is that half of the game looks as if it’s lacking a good amount of attention. While there are a decent amount of sections in the game that look quite sharp, there are just as many that leave a lot to be desired. The final thing that makes the game less visually appealing is that it has a very inconsistent framerate. For about half of the game’s firefights you’ll likely notice the framerate drop a considerable amount, especially during the last couple hours. And it doesn’t help that the game is littered with several bugs and glitches.

Sadly, not even the overall sound aspect fares too much better than the rest of the game. The first two things you’ll likely notice when playing is the dialogue and the quality of the voiceovers. Whoever wrote the game’s script must’ve been watching a lot of cliché, no-brainer action movies while writing it up, because BlackSite’s character dialogue is about as cheesy as it can get. Sure, there might be a couple one-liners that’ll get you to chuckle, but it’s still all too over-the-top most of the time. Fortunately, the voice actors fit their respective roles pretty well, and save for maybe one they prove to be substantial enough.

When it comes to sound effects, BlackSite is about as typical as you can get. The weapon’s sounds when being fired don’t come off as being either impressive or convincing; they all sound a little too subdued. About the only exception to this is with certain explosion noises, a few which sound like a train roaring down a collapsing bridge. But this mostly just applies to certain scripted moments, which you can probably guess by now are the center of the game’s good points. As for the game’s score, it’s pretty decent and fitting with the ending credits playing a chilling theme for you. Too bad you won’t get to hear much of the game’s music that proves beneficial to really make the music stand out.

With all this said it might sound as if BlackSite is the worst game ever known to man, or at least shooters. But this isn’t really the case; BlackSite is well and far away from being even a painful experience. The game is merely another mediocre bag of wasted potential tossed out that simply begs you to lower your expectations right before diving in. BlackSite doesn’t quite fail as a game, but it certainly comes close to offering too little for any satisfaction. If a little exploration and killing aliens is enough to keep you satisfied then BlackSite might be worth renting, just don’t expect anything beyond just that.