- Excellent use of the Unreal
engine
- Good degree of character customization
- Budget price is attractive
- Cumbersome game matching
- Balance issues
- Obscured information hinders character optimization
- Seemingly small player population inhibits actual gameplay
- Lack of single player game
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Blacklight: Tango Down
Score: 6.0 / 10
While games like Call of Duty: Modern
Warfare suck up all the big press buzz, it's not like that's the only
game in town when it comes to good shooters, and no, I'm not talking
about Medal of Honor. There are other shooters out there, and some of
them can be had for cheap if not free. One of these titles is Blacklight:
Tango Down. After getting some time with it, I'm finding that if you're
going to do a budget title, compromises really are inevitable, and
rarely to the good health of the game.
The bright spot of Blacklight is unquestionably the use of the Unreal
engine for the visuals. A great deal of attention was clearly lavished
on making the game look good, which in turn makes the game fun to run
around in. This may be a shooter, but it's light-years from “ugly.”
Character models move smoothly, weapons have a
level of detail that give them a sense of
realism, and buildings feel like they've been bearing mute witness to
the strange war being fought in the streets. As the game is set in
Eastern Europe, there's a lot of Cyrillic signage and narrow streets
which help the player feel like they're in the back streets of Belarus
rather than the nice safe avenues of America. Lighting in the game is
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excellently done. There are few maps where the sun is shining, and even
those have a cloudy cast to them, while the others are bathed in harsh
floodlights and softer neon lights to better create the shadows from
which players can strike without warning. On top of this, the game goes
the extra mile to help sell the idea that you're fighting tomorrow's war
with not merely guns and grenades, but full information and cybernetic
support as well. Certain grenades act as a sort of digital smokescreen
to help conceal a position while others force your avatar's computer
driven-helmet display to show a “blue screen” and reboot itself, and
it's visual touches like that that help sell the player on the
environment they're playing in. Additionally, the “Hyper Reality Visor”
effect is not only interesting, but useful from a gameplay standpoint,
as it points out the positions of friends, enemies, and the lockers used
to restore health and ammo. However, it should be pointed out that the
copious in-game advertising for NBC's upcoming show The Event, the
impending Resident Evil: Afterlife, and various computer component
manufacturers tends to diminish that sense of immersion. Bluntly, they
overdid that aspect of it. When it's all said and done, though, the game
looks great.
The audio on the game is kind of a mixed bag. The musical score is
decent, a semi-techno that suggests cyberized warfare where Europe meets
Asia, but it's nothing particularly exciting. The sound effects are
clear enough, but for some reason most of the weapon sounds feel like
variations on a theme, almost like they took one sound for the assault
rifle, tweaked it for the submachinegun, then tweaked it again for the
light machine gun. The obvious exceptions are the shotgun and the
grenades, and even those don't sound quite as authoritative as they
could. There is some small amount of voice acting in the game, but as
one might imagine, it's pretty spartan for a predominantly multiplayer
offering. Moreover, it's not terribly impressive. In the game's co-op
missions, the voice acting gets a little more exposure, but it's still
nothing to write home about.
In the field of gameplay, Blacklight compounds fast run-n-gun shooter
mechanics with highly questionable design choices, fatally compromising
the entire game. The game boasts multiple game modes including
domination, a themed CTF mode called “Retrieval,” and a mode called
“Detonate” which demands you defuse a bomb and then reset it inside your
enemy's base. I would have liked to have played some of those game
modes. However, it is difficult to play a game when there are no players
around and you do not have the option to deploy bots. There are no
dedicated servers for Blacklight, and as a consequence, there is no
browser to see what games are available. In point of fact, the only
games I was ever able to find were Team Deathmatch games. Not even
regular deathmatch, which absolutely boggles the mind. When you're
spending more time waiting to play the game than actually playing it,
you know you've got a problem on your hands. On top of this, there seems
to be some horrible game balancing issues which can turn a match into
either a tight race for supremacy or an abject slaughter. I can't speak
to whether or not there's cheating going on in the game, but the
impression I got was more along the lines of bad balance than bad
behavior. As a final insult, given the difficulty with which you can
actually get into a game, the claim of 16 man matches rings hollow.
However technically feasible it is, it's not happening in a practical
sense. Even more troublesome is the lack of a genuine single player
game. Yeah, yeah, it's supposed to be multiplayer. The problem is that,
with the lack of human players around, you've got to do something to
start moving up the ranks. While players can try to go solo through the
four co-op maps, any semblance of fun that might have survived the
interminable wait for more warm bodies in multiplayer is summarily
dispatched after about the third playthrough.
The game has a good bit of customization for a player's look and his
weapons. Playing mix-n-match with various parts to come up with a
firearm that truly suits your style of gameplay is certainly an
interesting little exercise, though occasionally frustrating, as some of
the weapon mods you get at the start of your career appear to be better
mechanically than some of the mods you get later on. Adding to the
frustration is an unhealthy level of obscurity insofar as the mechanics
of the game are concerned. One weapon customization that is seemingly
independent of level is the weapon tag, a small charm that hangs off the
left side of your primary weapon (apparently, nobody is left handed in
the Blacklight universe) which not only gives the weapon a little visual
flair, but also bestows certain benefits to the player. The problem is
that none of those benefits are listed beyond the obvious bumps to the
three listed yet unlabelled stats in the game. Would it truly have
killed the developers to spend the effort to add text to their cryptic
symbols so the players might have a better understanding of what was
going on? Would it have ravaged the budget to put in pop-up text boxes
over the mods and weapon tags to see just what is being modified and by
how much? For a game that is premised on the idea of manipulating and
denying information to the opponent, the lack of useful information for
your own purposes feels too much like a friendly fire casualty.
For all it's faults, Blacklight certainly has the potential to be a
great little game. If it can overcome the shortcomings of its design by
adding on to it, and if it can get a much larger and more active player
base, it could be a viable contender to Modern Warfare 2. Until that
happens, however, it's not quite good enough to outright recommend, nor
bad enough to outright dismiss.
