Masem’s Gaming Blog

For me, when I first played the demo of Blacksite: Area 51 from Midway on Xbox Live, it felt like it would be a good game: you didn’t have the full story, but you knew enough that it appeared to be about an alien invasion among more suburban settings. However, the demo’s shortness didn’t give much more of an impression of what the rest of the game would be like. Unfortunately, the full game is woefully sub-par compared to that brief demo section – it suffers from being way too short, lacking any significant challenge, and includes a host of technical problems that should have been caught before this went gold. This is definitely not a title I’d recommend.

Review Helpfulness: (3 votes, average: 4.67 out of 5)
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Story: C+

The game sets you as a soldier starting in a mission in Iraq to search for weapons of mass destruction, but find none of that: instead, you come across an alien artifact, and in the ensuing escape when strange alien creatures start to attack, lose one of your soldiers to their forces. Some years later, you’re flown into Nevada, where a freak storm has broken out over the area of Rachel, NV, near the fabled site of Area 51. Something is definitely happening, and while most of the residents have been evacuated, you’re ordered in to recover any other survivors. However, as you progress, you quickly realize that the Iraqi mission and the events happening today are linked, and only your team in in the right position to stop an alien invasion of the Earth.

Unfortunately, for a story on the grand scheme of things, it’s pretty predictable and lacks any aspect that really isn’t stereotypical. The characters are pretty flat and uninteresting, and voice work feels like it was called in. It doesn’t help that there’s no option for subtitles despite that key plot details are given while you’re flying in a chopper and makes it near impossible to make out.

Gameplay:D+

Blacksite overall comes out worse than several less-than-stellar full conversion mods done by third parties. The FPS elements are pretty much straight forward, but given that there are only 6 weapons in the game (2 influenced by alien design), there’s no variety or any real strategy besides “don’t get shot”. The only real different aspect of the game is that you can direct your squad to advance and attack a given spot or enemy, though depending on their morale (how badly they’ve been injured,for example), they may not want to move to spots of high danger if their morale is low. Its an interesting concept that is absolutely wasted on the game: I found no need to use this as at the second hardest difficulty level I was able to pretty much deal with foes on my own.

The game follows pretty much every FPS guideline by the book without any real invention of its own. There’s a couple vehicle sections which is basically a way to have you drive a couple of miles around to allow the story to progress, with only a few points where you stop to deal with a roadblock or similar. One section has you manning a mounted gun on a ground vehicle, while another has you manning one in a helicopter. But there’s almost no challenge in these sections – as long as you shoot anything that moves, you’re pretty much good to go.

Enemy AI is laughably stupid – they may have some pathfinding to find cover, but they work individually and will seem to follow the same paths around the map, making it really easy to pick off targets. Even in numbers, as long as you can find cover to recover health, you’re pretty much set for dealing with them. The gameplay is completely linear, even with one section that has you defending sections of a base that make you walk across the parts of it several times, the doors are arranged to control and imped your progress as needed to limit you to the section you need to defend.

The game does support multiplayer, but the game modes are nothing new: deathmatch and team DM, capture the flag, and its own version of the infection/zombie type called “Abducted”. Just like the single player campaign, there’s really nothing different from the standard FPS playbook in how multiplayer works.

Value/Replayability: C-

The game is short – there’s 6 chapters, and I was able to complete them in a single session of about 6 hours, at the second highest difficult level. While the game has multiplayer, and includes a challenge to find several dossiers about the single player maps to unlock short text segments to support the game’s story, there’s really no replay value in the game whatsoever.

Graphics: D+

I don’t know what it is about this game, but this is one of the worst performing titles I’ve seen for the 360. The game uses the Unreal engine (same as Gears of War) and thus should be able to handle what this game throws at it, but there are several points during basic firefights that the graphics slowed down, and even a couple points where the game momentarily froze after a big effect. I don’t know if this is because the game was optimized for another system (as it is also available for the PS3 and PC), or for other reasons, but this is pretty much something that should have been caught in quality testing.

The graphics themselves aren’t too bad – but it just doesn’t feel like a lot of work was made to get this up to next-gen console standards. It feels blocky and without a lot of subtle details on walls or ground to catch your eye. I even noticed a few places where texture alignment wasn’t complete or similar unpolished effects.

Audio: C

There’s not much to say here – the sound effects are there, there’s some music but nothing great, and as previously mentioned, it feels like the voice actors are just reading their lines and that’s it. There’s a lack of turning on subtitles which is a bad idea given how there are volume level problems between key dialog you should be hearing and other background noises.

Overall: C-

Blacksite: Area 51 is a bad game – it feels like a first attempt at a full conversion mod, or that it was very much rushed out of production to be out before Christmas. This game needs a lot of work to even make it enjoyable to play – there’s a lot wrong with it both technically and design-wise. At best, its easy to work through in a rental, but likely will hit the bargain bin before long.

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