BlackSite: Area 51 (Xbox 360)

Politics and mediocre shooters make strange bedfellows.
1/31/2008 12:00 AM | 0 Comments | Page 1 of 2

Around the midpoint of BlackSite: Area 51, you fight a generic boss monster who begins to spawn smaller monsters. Your burly comic relief sidekick says, "Aw, hell, it's crapping out those octopus dog things!" This is perhaps BlackSite's most insightful moment, and a metaphor for the game itself: something big, generic, derivative and absurd that craps out octopus dog things.

This is the sequel to the forgettable Area 51, which was Midway's attempt to claim a bit of the shooter mindshare. In that game, you descended into a military base infested with the traditional big-eyed grays of UFO lore. You gradually mutated as you played, acquiring a few superpowers to complement the gunplay. But BlackSite has none of this because the developers decided to reboot the franchise -- and in this case, "reboot" means "make more like Half-Life."

As a shooter, BlackSite's main problem is that it does nothing to stand out. It begins as a sort of modern day Call of Duty, using the same medkit-less health system and a rail-ride gunner mission. Then the mutants show up and it goes all Half-Life, complete with headcrabs, cloned commandos, and a dead ringer for Alyx as its token female. At some points, it also attempts a Gears of War vibe with a buddy system, gruff grunt talk and the equivalent of corpsers for boss monsters. Halo's vehicle controls make an appearance. The boss at the end of the game, who has about a thousand hit points, is just what you'd expect from such an unimaginative shooter. In short, there is nothing you haven't seen before.

This might not be a problem if the game were more competent and less sloppy. There's no provision to adapt it to a gamepad with any sort of auto-aim, which artificially inflates the difficulty level on the 360. At one point, you get to fight with a helicopter hovering overhead to help you, but it won't attack anything unless you manually point at and then designate the target. Which begs the question, why don't you simply shoot the target yourself? The plot sometimes makes no sense. Early on, you're told that you can't be extracted from a mission, but a vehicle will be delivered so you can drive out -- at which point a big, huge helicopter arrives, hovers 15 feet overhead, and drops a Humvee. It didn't even occur to the makers of BlackSite to offer an explanation for why the helicopter couldn't simply drop a rope and carry you away. If the point of the level is that you're an elite special forces operative who's been abandoned -- and, yes, this will be important -- shouldn't someone have been paying attention to such a glaring plot hole?

The lack of attention is also apparent technically. Although it's built from the Unreal 3 engine, you'd never know from the murky visuals and restrictive level design. The engine doesn't fare very well on the 360, which has recently seen stellar graphics in titles like Halo 3, Assassin's Creed, and Call of Duty 4: Modern Combat. Enemies are outlined with a white glow to keep them from blending into the brown soupy palette that supposedly evokes Iraq, and then Nevada. The character models look terrible, bullet holes float in midair, and scripted doors don't always open when they're supposed to. It seems that so much energy was spent on a few canned door-opening animations that nothing was left over for something as simple as having an NPC look at you when he's talking to you.