G-pinions

Knowing full well that Tom has written about Black, i've decided to write my own impressions without having read so much as his post title. I figure it will be interesting to see how our thoughts differ and where we agree, as opposed to the usual point/counterpoint arguments we so often engage in.

Really, what the games sets out to do, it does spectacularly well. Let's review the rules:

1. Guns are the stars
2. Every bullet is your baby
3. Bigger and louder
4. Leave a trail of destruction
5. Death is an opportunity

Yeah, I'd say that it delivered on all of them, and even went above and beyond on a few. The sound design specifically is, in my humble, the best of it's generation. It may just be that I've recently upgraded my sound system tenfold, but no game's bullets (and there are a LOT of games with bullets) have sounded so exquisite as this. Every ricochet, echo and rumble of gasses meeting is precise and consistent with wherever you're standing and whatever you're shooting. The graphics are also pretty phenomenal, with draw distances and ambiance of a very high caliber (bah, no pun intended, but it works). The art direction is great, even if the art design isn't; it's a drab, depressingly accurate take on predictable environments that get away with being awesome simply because they're ripe for destruction. Steel refineries are lame and all, but they would be infinitely worse in a game that didn't let you make them crumble.

Overall, the gameplay in its most isolated state is brilliant, gratifying and visceral; taking advantage of the first person perspective in an almost fundamentally new way. Unfortunately, that doesn't mean that the game works as a whole. Burnout works as fantastically as it does because of the elements inherent in making a good racing game - how the car feels, and how the world reacts to your presence. Level design and presentation are a distant second to those ingredients. Criterion made racing games great again because they brought back the velocity and the tangibility of driving a car.

The shooter genre isn't so simple, and they're missing two vital elements - pacing and story. Pacing in that, as IGN hit right on the head, the game starts with a bang and is constantly entertaining, but has very few high or low points. As I was telling Tom, turning the side of a skyscraper into a smoke and glass pie with a rocket launcher would be a lot more impactful if it didn't happen in the first level. The game would be that much better if it started out typical and became consistently more destructive throughout. As it is, is starts out amazing and almost drowns in its own excessive vision. When I say story, I'm really just asking for the slightest bit of narrative motivation to be literally bringing down the house, even if the details are a throwaway. Halo has aliens, Call of Duty 2 has nazis, Timesplitters has flaming zombies - I don't necessarily need to know why I'm fighting them, but there a mutual understanding between the game and I that I should be. It's just how these things work. Whereas Black's quasi-terrorist-evil-vague-foreigner types just aren't menacing as much as they are fodder for falling through a pane of glass, as beautiful as it is.

First impressions are important, and Black made one I'll probably remember forever. Over four hours in, it all blends together a bit too much, even if it's simultaneously satisfying several of my needs as a human male. I'm not disappointed in the least, but I also can't unabashedly recommend it. It's myopic to the point of detriment, even if it does it's thing ridiculously well.