Black

Gun porn

By Chris Pickup

The team responsible for bringing gloriously catastrophic explosions to driving games in the Burnout series have come up with an equally destructive first-person shooter, the ominously entitled Black.

Black follows the story of a special operations soldier who’s sitting in a jail cell ‘fessing up to a government official about the chaotic missions he’s faced. The game puts you in his shoes as he recounts the missions via flashback. You are bombarded with countless enemies to dispatch with your vast stockpile of weapons. It really is that simple, you move through varying environments destroying anything that moves or doesn’t move, completing the banal mission objectives

Almost everything can be blown to pieces meaning the game plays like the movie Commando, albeit without Arnie’s hilarious jibes. This magnificent scale of destruction has never quite been seen in a console shooter before. The game wisely exploits intense explosions coupled with rag doll physics meaning it’s as entertaining to watch as it is to play. This is partly due to the intelligent use of the aging XBox and PS2 technology, the lighting is incredible, moving from inside to outside you’re first blinded by bright light then as the character’s eyes supposedly adjust things become more distinct.

Rather than aiming for crystal clear images Black invokes pure griminess; blowing up a car makes oily smoke billow high into the air; bullets impact with force leading to the spectacular destruction of wooden doors and thin plaster walls that scatter the floor with debris and leave the air laden with dust. Most spectacularly, this destructible scenery leads to some Matrix-style pillar destruction scenes. Black looks markedly better than most XB360 games currently on sale

The quite obvious stars of Black are its guns and so a lot of thought has been put into making them as over-the-top as possible. This all adds to the game’s exhilaratingly destructive character that builds up to somewhat of an anticlimax at only eight levels long. The lack of checkpoints in each drawn-out mission can be infuriating but replaying levels is never really a chore when a game is this beautifully destructive. The onslaught of action that this game brings however can only be enjoyed in the short term, and like a Hollywood action movie, it won’t leave you in your seat for long after the credits roll.