BlackSite: Area 51

November 19,2007 - Christmas season is rapidly approaching, and the gaming community is reaping the benefits of having some of the best titles ever to grace this generation releasing in the Q3-Q4 of 2007. With hard hitters like Call of Duty 4, Super Mario Galaxy, Halo 3, Ratchet and Clank: Tools of Destruction, and Assassin’s Creed releasing in such close proximity on the calendar, smaller budget and less known games like BlackSite: Area 51 can easily get lost in the fray. Mixing unique exposé, pretty graphics, and steady pacing, Midway’s BlackSite: Area 51 doesn’t innovate too much but delivers a solid FPS that doesn’t deserve to suffer the same fate so many other games will this Holiday season.

The entirety of the story is delivered through dialogue that is spoken between firefights and actions that you personally witness in the midst of combat. The first level of the game will feel like a modern shooter as you (Capt. Pierce) lead Special Forces team Delta Squad through an Iraqi city in an effort to uncover a secret biological weapon. Towards the end of the mission you’ll see hulking mutated soldiers attacking on all fours instead of the normal insurgents. Your surreptitious medic plays these soldiers off as mutants from the chemicals. As you progress through the other five levels in the game, you’ll soon uncover a government conspiracy, face the possible eradication of the American government, and discover that the crystal you find in Iraq is much more important than is looks.

Developer Midway Austin designed gameplay to mostly have you and your squad running and gunning like many FPS’s do. However, they split these streaks up with driving sequences, boss battles, sniper shooting, rail-gun shooting from a helicopter, and manning turrets. The driving is admittedly jerky, but passable enough that it breaks the monotony and mixes up the gameplay despite the fact that no new mechanics to the genre are ever introduced. Not many weapons were implemented, as Midway feel content to leave you with a semi-automatic rifle and a pistol for the most part. However, you’ll get to wield a sniper, rocket launcher, and few unique weapons the enemy use. Weapons feel appropriately heavy and take balanced reload times, but sometimes they are unwieldy, hard to aim, and flat out refuse to switch out to your secondary when you prompt it to. Additionally, the semi-auto and pistol combination re-appears back in your inventory after every level, so that rocket launcher you were saving magically disappears. Midway also threw in some simple squad commands. With a simple click you can send your teammates to open doors, target foes, get on turrets, or move to a point. This one-button technique is easy, intuitive, flexible, and will never get in the way of normal combat.

Using a modified version of Unreal Engine 3, the same that was used in John Woo Presents: Stranglehold, BlackSite: Area 51 runs smoothly and prettily even on standard definition, although the crisp text on the Hi-Def is mostly unreadable on standard. The environments, weapons, vehicles, allies, and weapons all seem to enjoy the shades of black and grey so common in FPS’s these days. The enemy weapons you pick up, a plasma cannon and a scatter gun (a sort of shotgun) are colorful with very unique designs and reload animations. Everything looks gritty and realistic as well, from the broken down streets of a bombed-out Iraq to the eyes of your comrades. One thing that constantly bugged us though was that the people talking to us never actually looked in our direction. Rather it seems they were programmed to look at a certain spot, which you’ll need to move to so that it feels like you, and not that nearby wall, is participating in the conversation. And, while the levels were designed excellently to reduce backtracking, there were the occasional invisible walls that blocked off what looked to be very accessible places. In one boss battle, we needed to jump off a roof to engage the enemy, but the problem was that invisible walls surrounded the entire roof save for a tiny gap that was easy to miss, which was exceedingly frustration. Colorful markers will appear at the next door you need to move to, but if there lacks any HUD for distant targets, and you’ll need to rely on the level design to move you in the right direction without getting lost.

The audio also has its high and low points. Enemies can be overheard making plans, and gunfire can be heard through walls. Each weapon also sounds differently, although their sounds are very muted and under-exaggerated for what feels like an arcade shooter. Your allies will say some very funny things early on in the game that will make you actually like them. Greyson, your go-to guy, doesn’t put up with obvious bullcrap and isn’t afraid to say what you’re thinking which can amount to hilarity like, “Bunch of cheese-dicks at HQ, man.” Your not-so-humanoid enemies give away their positions with unique grunts to allow for just enough time to turn around and shoot before they overwhelm you. The musical score during combat and key scenes amounts to background noise and is easily forgettable. When distant from you, allies’ voices will come over a headset so you aren’t forced to stand five feet from them at all times to avoid missing key dialogue.

BlackSite: Area 51 executed well enough to warrant the sequel it alludes to at the end, although Midway still has some work to do. While the game was well paced, there wasn’t much depth to the individual gameplay facets used to break up regular running and gunning, and the lack of variety in weapons was disturbing for a shooter. What is unquantifiable is that we had an absolute blast playing through this game and would be amiss if it got lost in the marketing maelstrom of this quarter so much so that it doesn’t get the attention it deserves.

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