Blacksite is filled with bugs, and I’m not talking about Area 51 alien creatures either. This game is rife with technical glitches that show that it was rushed to production in time for the holiday season. In one vehicle mission, the game refused to let me back in my vehicle, instead assuming I was pressing RB to order my squad to flip an already upright vehicle. I had to use all my grenades and half my ammo to knock the vehicle around until the game would let me back in. On another vehicle mission, I stopped the Humvee on an incline and when I exited I was stuck between the vehicle and a rock with the screen spinning in a manner I haven’t seen since my 21st birthday. My only choice was to restart from the last checkpoint. One time I had finished a pitched battle and decided to walk back around the building I had just come from to scrounge some ammo, only to find that the buildings and textures were gone, and all that remained were ramps and stairs leading to oblivion and ammo crates floating in mid-air. I also found myself annoyed with weapons oversights, such as the game resetting your loadout to the default rifle and pistol whenever I entered a new area despite what I had been carrying before I open the door, or my grenades magically disappearing just before the final boss stage. Pauses for loading are constant and noticeable within a mission anytime you walk to a new area. Blacksite Area 51 should be a case study for developers on what happens when you skip beta testing in an attempt to make a quick buck.
Sometimes Xbox Live play can be the saving grace of an otherwise ordinary game, but it’s not the case with Blacksite. The biggest problem I found was the lack of quality players, as most gamers seem to be trying it a few times then going back to Call of Duty 4 or Halo 3. There is no coop play included, but gamers can play ranked and unranked matches of Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, Capture the Flag and Abduction where you score points based on infecting and avoiding infection of the “Reborn” virus. In light of the many variants and online play styles that most shooters offer, Blacksite’s offering is very thin. I didn’t notice any problems with lag or latency, but that could be a result of the fact that I was typically in games with no more than 3 other players.
Blacksite has its strong points, though they are few and far between. The audio portion is superb with a great musical score that accompanies the action fairly well, but doesn’t always slow back down after the fight. Battle sounds are well done with gun effects that are among the best of any shooter. Although I disliked the script and all the inane comments and cheap shots, the voice acting is exceptional. Unfortunately for Midway, sound effects are probably the last thing any gamer considers when making a purchase decision.
As you can see from the screen shots, Blacksite boasts some impressive graphics built upon the Unreal engine, but looks can be deceiving. While the textures and character builds are fantastic, this title suffers some extreme frame rate issues, which became most apparent in the final mission. The conclusion of the game is set in a turbulent swirling vortex-like area with a lot of on screen activity, which bogged the display down to an unplayable 4 or 5 frames per second. It was all I could do to get off my rappel rope and fight enemies at the same time. Some of the problems could have been alleviated with Microsoft forbidden hard drive caching, but the fact remains that the display stutters and stammers throughout the short 6 mission campaign.
Blacksite Area 51 is a textbook example of how half-assed ideas rushed to production become half-assed games. Instead of emulating Unreal, this game makes Hour of Victory look like Game of the Year. It’s one thing for my fellow critics and me to call the game flawed, but when Blacksite designer Harvey Smith says, “this project was so f**ked up”, that carries a little more weight (yes that is a quote). Smith points to numerous technical problems, saying the team didn’t have adequate time to test and polish the game, and Blacksite went from alpha to final, skipping beta testing. He also intimated that many gamers failed to see the game’s attempts at humor. We saw it Harvey we just didn’t like it. Egghead programmers should stick to programming, and leave the bad jokes to Carrot Top.
