Ignition and Zombie have just entered the FPS arena with their budget shooter Blacklight: Tango Down. Over the past few months we’ve gone hands-on with the game and probed the development team about the title and it looked and sounded like it was going to offer a quality FPS experience that could possibly rival some of its full-priced counterparts.
Eager to get down and dirty with a new shooter (I am going through an FPS revival phase at the moment) the download began via Steam coming in around 1GB in size. Before I carry on, it must be noted that the game was being touted in the PR as a AAA title at low cost. Now I know PR love to exaggerate the quality of their games so it comes as no shock that the only part of that quote that is correct is the pricing.
Featuring four co-op missions, seven multiplayer modes including Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, Retrieval, Domination, Detonate, Last Man Standing, Last Team Standing and twelve multiplayer maps, the game is very reasonably priced, you can’t argue with that. However, if a game is cheap then that’s an incentive to buy the game, not an incentive to be bollocks.
So what about the story? Well there is a story (read the game docs) but it‘s not really conveyed at all in the actual game, it’s more of “here’s some background info in case you were wondering and it’s not really required”. Blacklight is a quick to play FPS in a very old-school style and you don’t really need to know much more than that. Logon and get stuck in.
Zombie has come up with some neat ideas in Blacklight; there is the whole weapon customisation deal where weapons are upgraded as you earn experience points the more you play. It’s not an original idea but it’s a feature that could have been easily overlooked. There is also the nifty Hyper Reality Visor which allows you to spot the enemy through solid objects such as walls. This is quite a cool feature and it’s only available for a few seconds at time and you can’t shoot with it activated which is a shame but understandable. Perhaps the Visor was added so nobody would bother to come up with a “see through walls hack”.
The player is also equipped with two grenade types the standard blow up grenade and the weird digital smoke grenade thingy. The standard grenade does what it says on the tin and the digital grenade sets off a weird pixel effect which can be used as cover. Annoyingly enough this is all that it’s really good for.
An area that let’s the game down is the presentation, the menus are ugly and annoying to use, a happy medium obviously a compromise in their design had to be found so they could function on PC and the consol. However, the overall presentation looks like a three year old has drawn the menus which can make it frustrating when navigating through game modes and weapon customization menus.
Gameplay wise, Blacklight is OK, but nothing more than that. What Zombie has achieved, and I commend them for this in a time where most FPS titles require you run for cover every five seconds, is a fast-paced experience that requires lightning fast reactions to come out on top in a gun battle. In many ways the gameplay reminds me of the old Quake and Unreal Tournament; fast and frantic.
An online game can die in the first week of launch with a lack of players and Blacklight is already falling into this trap. With no dedicated servers and only a matchmaking system which feels iffy at best, it can be painful trying to get a game going, no matter what mode you’re playing. As a test this week it took about 10-20 minutes to actually get into a game if there were enough players, and more often than not, there were never enough players to start the game during this time so the other player left. This is incredibly frustrating considering Blacklight is designed for multiplayer, it’s also frustrating because you have to watch the annoying menu background flick between flashing images. If you don’t suffer from epilepsy now, watching the menus in Blacklight for long enough will bring it on.
do however have a couple of solutions for lack of player problem. Either market the game properly or hire forty gamers for two weeks to keep the lobbies full while the game gets some column inches. I’m pretty sure there will be some company in China that could offer the service of some elite fraggers.
So the verdict? Well I really want to love this game, but the developers have made the whole game feel rather depressing and the fact that I can’t find other players without having to sit and wait for long periods drove me nuts.
Being a budget game there is still no excuse for lack of quality. Look at Torchlight, a cheap game that was absolutely cracking and developed by a small team. At a 1GB download Blacklight is not that small, remember when games such as Quake and Unreal Tournament used to come on one CD? They were quality, Blacklight: Tango Down is sadly average at best but had the potential to be something special.
That's a fair score.