Blacksite Area 51 : May Contain more Bugs than Aliens.

By Shadow Wave

Area 51 is probably one of the larger mysteries on the planet, with so many rumors and questions surrounding it. Are UFOs real? What do Aliens really look like? Where is this place? All questions that can provoke a developer to create a world where it does exist and make up their own unique game. Well this game is as bad as something that could be hidden in Area 51.

Sadly, Area 51: Blacksite simply is a bad game from start to finish, there are no pick ups in quality what so ever. Whether it be boring boss fights to the constant array of glitches that you will run into. Midway has stepped down a rung from their ladder, as the quality of their second Area 51 game is severely worse than their first. Area 51 for the original Xbox had a decent story, variation of enemies and boss fights as you progress, I give them kudos for actually putting the stereotypical little grey aliens in their game, it was a nice semi-authentic touch.

Area 51: Blacksite puts you in the shoes of the mute Echo squad Captain, Aeran Pierce and his squad mates Cody Grayson and Logan Somers, who are sent into Iraq to investigate and find possible weapons of mass destruction, but what they find is much worse. Hidden deep underground is an alien artifact that becomes active when Echo squad enters the room. Aliens burst through the walls and escape is the only means of survival. Somers doesn’t make it. 2 years later Peirce and his squad are sent to Nevada, where militia have taken over the now shut down Area 51. Reports are that the same life forms Peirce and his squad witnessed in Iraq are here and need to be stopped, communication with troops closer to Area 51 has been lost, Peirce must succeed before Earth changes forever.

The irony in Blacksite is that a lot the time you will be fighting humans, except they have aligned themselves with the Aliens. Every few firefights you will encounter some aliens as well, just the majority will be against humans, although there are still your pure alien encounters, but they are not as common. Aliens come in a select variety; you have your humans, humans that are mostly machine, little exploding aliens that act as land mines when driving. Also your zombie like Aliens which mainly melee attack you, but can also vomit on you from a distance. Then your larger spider like aliens, these are the most common aliens you will fight throughout and finally your large worm aliens that fire orange exploding balls at you, these are mainly encountered in vehicle missions.

Blacksite’s gameplay is limited to how much you can get over the annoying bugs that pop up. If you can put up with them while wearing a smile, the game should be quite enjoyable. Squad control is meant to play a key feature in Blacksite’s gameplay, but it becomes more of a chore to make them do anything right. Throughout the game I found myself giving orders to my squad multiple times before they actually did anything. The whole system is rather clunky as they give only one button to control them, this seems good at first, but it just gets in the way by the end of the game. You really feel like you need a specific attack, move, help and regroup order buttons which could have easily been given to the D-pad which has no function what so ever in the game.

Boss fights are surprisingly terrible and recycled and with the 5 main boss fights in the game, 4 of those fights are against the same enemy you’ve beaten before. Boss fights consist of shooting the glowing spot on their bodies with some form of heavy weaponry – usually the rocket launcher or a turret. But these are easy and over within 5 minutes. You just feel cheapened that the developers couldn’t think of something better to fight. It feels like an RPG, where you fight the same boss multiple times throughout the game, but at least they have different or new abilities each time around. But what’s even more disappointing is that the last Boss fight is the most lackluster of all, there is no strategy besides shoot constantly and strafe until the boss is dead which only takes 1 minute.

The game throws out much more ammo than you need, you will never feel like you need to conserve your ammo. For an alien based game there are only 2 weapons in the game which could possibly be alien weaponry: The Plasma Rifle acts basically as a small and weaker rocket launcher and the Scatter Gun, which is a shotgun that can charge up for a more damaging shot. The main gun you will be using the whole game is your Assault Rifle. You start every mission off with your Assault rifle, besides being the default gun, its the most effective and useful weapon you can use as it does decent damage. And its the only rapid fire gun you can have which is really needed. Grenades are here too, you can carry 5 and are very effective against whatever they blow up nearby.

Driving vehicles is a large part of Blacksite and it is possibly the worst driving experience I have ever had on the original Xbox or Xbox 360 console. Midway have gone to a lot of effort to set up pretty good driving sequences but the controls and how the vehicles act is just terrible. Driving has been implemented the same way as Bungie’s Halo 3. Thinking thats a good thing? In theory yes. But not in this game. For starters, from the moment you push forward on the joystick you will be going close to the vehicles full speed, your car turns so sharply you will run into the wall your driving next too – a lot. No matter what speed you go the vehicle will never skid or slide. Every turn is sharp. Regardless of if you are holding accelerate, you will always turn to wherever you move the camera, which is another easy way to crash. I found myself tapping the left joystick forward every couple of seconds so I did not crash the car into a wall and to keep the speed down. The main fear about crashing is that often I got stuck in walls or small obstacles, forcing to reload the last checkpoint or try and move the car. With most of the driving levels aimed at avoiding large worm like creatures or avoiding alien land mines. Driving becomes a huge chore.

Some of the bugs I noticed I am not sure are even bugs or glitches. But are a stupid idea the developers have put in. The first thing you may notice is when you are using a turret, every time you move the cross hair it will stop for a second, this is to try and give the impression of recoil, but all it does is make it become annoying and totally unnecessary. For people starting the game, they may be a bit confused as there are 3 difficulties; Casual, Hard and Expert. But if they check the achievement list the difficulties listed as Easy, Medium and Hard, confusing eh? For the record I played in “Hard” and it seemed more of a medium difficulty.

One play session I had, there was a constant flickering aura of random colours at the top of the screen in a line. A few times sound would crack and stop for a second. Using the main menu was sometimes very slow and the frame rate would sometimes get so bad the game would lock up for a while. Quite a funny one is when people inside a helicopter would be standing and their head and feet would be going through the roof of the helicopter. This is not a bug but is deserving of going here, your allies will just appear in vehicles. No opening doors or anything, thats bad form Midway, developers have been doing this since the N64 days.

The game also only lasts 4-6 hours. And I never came across a difficult part. The length combined with these problems, do not go well together.

Presentation in the game is quite well done. Graphics are good but it is still the worst looking game on the UT3 engine. Character models look pretty decent, environments look nice, even though they are bland. What is most irritating is how badly shadows are done, quite often you will see the outlines of shadows look like massive squares instead of being a smooth shadow that other games on the engine have done. The draw distance is not very good too, in driving levels you will see the lines of the road being painted ahead of you. Audio in the game is pretty average, voices are not too bad, but sadly you will not hear much alien tongue from enemies unless it is scripted which kind of defeats the immersion that you want from a video game. Music and sound effects are suited for the game and goes along nicely.

If you wanted a good multiplayer experience from Blacksite, don’t buy this game. I found it impossible to find a game, and I can only imagine its as average as Single Player.

Overall Area 51: Blacksite is a very generic shooter filled with bugs, boring fights and other irritants that prevent it from becoming a game that will be remembered. For a better experience save some money and buy Area 51 on the Original Xbox.
© 2008 Ben Cadwallader

6.0/10