Blacklight: Tango Down Single Player Review

Blacklight: Tango Down 'Black Ops' Review

Blacklight: Tango Don't

     First, some disclaimers: This is only for the single player missions. I haven't (and may not) venture forth onto Xbox Live for competitive multiplayer. My patience for the teabagging Timmies is at an all-time low.

 Totally not like a $15 game... really. And I think that's 'objective' in Russian. Get it?

     With Matt64's help, I played thru Blacklight: Tango Down's single player missions today, and I came away pretty impressed. For a game which only costs $15 and weighs in at around 700 mb as an Xbox Live Arcade download, it looks pretty damn good and it plays pretty damn well, tho it does have some significant - perhaps deal-breaking - flaws. The graphics, tho not on a par with Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, exploit the Unreal engine to the max for such a lightweight game.

The Blacklight Equivalent of a Red Key Card

    The single player/co-op mode of Blacklight: Tango Down is composed of four stand-alone missions, called 'Black Ops', which you can play alone or with friends against the The Order, a shadowy military group, and the Infected, zombie-like, sometimes armed denizens of a nameless burned out, deserted Russian city. ('Blacklight', BTW, is your codename. It's what your heavily Russian-accented female communicator calls you when she gives you terse, nearly unintelligible orders to go here and there and do this and that.) Though some adverts have featured some striking graphics of rapelling enemy troops and massive airships, there are no large-scale encounters. It's ground combat of the most fundamental sort - you versus the sometimes dopey enemy AI.

See this? Not in the 'Black Ops' missions.

    The single player gameplay is typical FPS fare, without a real story: Get orders to go somewhere and do something, kill some bad guys, unlock a door, kill some more bad guys, unlock the next door, pick up an item to plug it into a console while killing bad guys along the way... Not exactly innovative, but at least a known quantity. Except, not satisfied by a mere button press to open the doors, the devs made the door unlocks minigames. In one you execute the Simon-like task of replicating sound tones using the XYBA buttons... No, really. Look at this:

 The Simon game of the dystopic future Russia...

    Another one is moving a triangle with the D-pad along a series of bars with other triangles moving back and forth. No, really. Where every other FPS in the known universe would just have your just hold down "X" till the task is done, Zombie Studios decided to get fancy. Best of all, screw up in any way and you get to start the whole unlock thing all over again, just like when you get killed on a Black Ops mission...

Let's play 'Move the Triangle'. Ready? Go!

    It's difficult to see why this was done. In earlier CoD games, there were minigames like this. They had wrestling matches with enemy AI where you had to mash the "X" button for 10 minutes or you'd get a Nazi bayonet in the scrotum. And I hate that shit. It was annoying, tiring to my thumb, and it took me right out of the goddamn game instantly.

 In future dystopic Russia, Dominos is still in business, but for pickups only.

    Instead of the commonly used regnerating health mechanic, the Zombie Studios devs used a combination of a partial regen and health packs. The health packs, which look like the red insulated pizza carriers from Dominos Pizza, which are found individually lying around, instantly restore your health to the default 175 point max. If you don't have health packs around, you seem to regen health to the last point where you took some real damage. (I was stuck on 88 points in some fairly long stretches of the levels; that seems to be a hard-coded point in the game. At 88 points, if you take a few bullets, you can just wait and regen to 88 points or use the visor to boost back to 88.) Using the Hyper Reality Visor also helps restore your health to that magic 88 point level, or whatever lower number your health was down to.
    There are open crates of the Dominos Health Pies where you can just hover and pick up continuous health. (The game makes a cute ch-ching! sound as the health points clock up to your max.)

It's the legendary Crate o' Health! Ch-ching!

    Interesting piece of equipment that Hyper Reality Visor. It can spot enemies, ammo crates, health locations right through most obstacles (tho you can't fight back while using it, leaving you vulnerable). It also seemed to me that the enemy seemed pretty frackin' pyschic about when I was using it, choosing that moment to swarm all over my ass. There's a lag, intentional or not, after you stop using the visor and when you can use your weapon. Even after the visor is out of your POV, you sometimes will fruitlessly yank on the fire trigger without effect while some infected or Order flunky is pounding you.

 Put on the damn visor for one damn second...

    I found the weapon POVs to look especially realistic. Blacklight: Tango Down also boasts superior audio. The sound effects are excellent. The weapon sounds have a punch to them that many other, more expensive FPSes lack. I particularly like the sidearm sound effect. It just sounds powerful to me.

Weapon POV aiming down sights. Note the excellent blur effect.

    Weapon loadouts are in several classes: Sniper, Assault Rifle (of which there are two, differing only in attachments) and SMG. The weapon loadouts follow the CoD pattern: Primary and Secondary for both projectile and explosive weapons. The iron sights have an aiming reticle above them; in the few instances where I picked up an enemy's scoped weapon, I instantly regretted it. I found the use of the aiming dot both blocks your peripheral vision and makes it difficult to target moving enemies. I'll stick with the iron sights.

    Unfortunately, you can't carry two primary weapons. Trying to swap your sidearm for a fallen enemy's primary will only make you drop your own primary in its place. Likewise, you can carry a standard frag and one specialty grenade – like the EMP-type that scrambles the enemy visors (and your own) and a 'Digi-bomb' grenade, which gives your visor a blue screen of death. No, really. The Digi-bomb reboots your helmet, rendering you momentarily blind.

    It looks like there might be unlocks for the weapons in campaign mode, but I've no clue how to go about unlocking them – except maybe by sucking a lot less than I have been at the SP mode of the game.

     I wish, tho, that the dropped weapons would stick around longer before disappearing. A few times, weapons dropped by fallen enemies winked out of sight before I could pick them up. Ammo is either scrounged from fallen weapons or from crates similar to the health crate. Playing on normal difficulty, the game is annoying to play solo, but it's way more fun in co-op mode. Playing with Matt64, it seemed a bit too easy sometimes on 'Normal' difficulty. (There's no 'Easy' mode, only Normal, Hard, and Insane.)

    The enemy opponents on Normal mode do like to scoot and shoot. They strafe back and forth, guns blasting away at you. The threat levels are a nice mix, with shotguns, SMGs, ARs, and LMGs. The AI is somewhat sketchy, tho. Some enemies will stand stock still in direct line of sight, other times they do the 'dog pile on the rabbit' thing and swarm all over you. But that's no different than CoD in that respect. Another similarity in the game is how the game kinda cheats. Enemies that were not visible with the Hyper Reality Visor suddenly appear out of nowhere; and enemies miraculously spawn in your hip pocket, just in time to give you a Hyper Reality schwanz in your ass. Some enemies – like the Infected, who sometimes wield automatic weapons but are usually content just to cudgel your ass – exist only to be bullet-sponges and soften you up for enemies who are lurking just out of range of your visor.

     Some reviews of the game already point to an inadequate multiplayer matchmaking system that makes you wait sometimes extreme lengths of time before putting you in a match as well as some difficulty in keeping connected with your friends. Tho we didn't venture into multiplayer, we found that whenever we exited a co-op game singly, we couldn't invite each other back to the co-op lobby without exiting to the Xbox 360 dashboard. Speaking only for the single player Black Ops missions, Blacklight: Tango Down is an economically attractive game, with very nice (tho not amazing) graphics and unremarkable single player gameplay. For most players, it would not be worth buying solely for the single player campaigns.

    I don't regret buying the game. I did like it and enjoy it, especially when I was able to team up with Matt64. Despite the game's flaws, I can't help liking it. And, as an XIM360 user, I found the game has a nice PC-like feel to the controls that I really like. Next week, Matt64 and I will try out the multiplayer and report back on that.

Whaddaya want for a measly $15, anyway?