This was a weird era for shooters. They had progressed past the "boomer shooter" template, but in the wake of Half-Life, many developers didn't really know what to do if they wanted to create something focused purely on action. Returning to monke was viewed as unacceptable -- we're living in a Three-Dimensional World now, soldier, the People demand a Cinematic Experience. As a result, many shooters from 2000-2006 feel like they're being pulled between two extremes and tearing apart in the process. In a pre-CoD2 time, a select few games managed to straddle this dichotomy (F.E.A.R. is one such example, Return to Castle Wolfenstein another) but the vast majority are worse off because of this. Black is one of them.

Described as "gun porn" by the developers, in one of the earliest recorded examples of "Extreme Cringe," Black was meant to show off the Power of Firearms, make you feel like a God with an AK-47, raining destruction against any of those who dare stand in your way. In practice, it's an underwhelming shooter with worse gunplay than Goldeneye, except it makes you look at the guns a lot. Yes, it has detailed reloading animations. It also released in 2006, when this wasn't really impressive anymore. It's not the developers' fault that this came out couple of months after CoD2, a better game in (almost) every single respect... But it sure doesn't help. They want you to look at these guns. They REQUIRE that you look at the guns. Every time you switch weapons, you chamber a round for no reason. Every time you reload, an incredibly obnoxious depth-of-field effect obscures the rest of the screen (I think this game in particular is the reason I hate DoF and turn it off whenever possible).

Despite this, the guns. Feel. WEAK. Enemies can take an ungodly amount of damage before dying, which is probably why every gun's magazine holds about double the amount of ammo that it should. You can riddle a guy with bullets like he's Kenny and you're ED-209, and he'll eventually go down after expending half of your AK's 60-round mag. You have grenades, but your character has a wrist that would get you called slurs in PE. The prevailing tactic seems to be to shoot the copious red barrels and other explosive objects strewn around, rather than shooting at the enemies themselves. Those explosives, and the destructible environmental elements, also dry up pretty quickly into the meager 4 hour campaign. The game is also completely bloodless, adding to the lack of impact, which is extra strange. It feels like it's a T rated game in every respect except for guys yelling the Fuck Word on your radio.

The controls also suck, of course. It has a bizarre control scheme, naturally, because that wasn't standardized yet, but at least it's fully customizable. The strangest part is that you have "cycle weapon forward/backward" buttons despite only being able to hold 2 at a time anyway. The aiming is as bad as you would expect from a console shooter of this era where you click the right stick to zoom in (not ADS). It's easy to talk shit about Left Trigger, Right Trigger controls, but it's vastly superior to this crap that we were dealing with in the Before Times.

The one thing I will praise in Black is the audio. It's the sole saving grace. The guns do sound loud as shit, and the music (from Chris Tilton and Michael Giacchino, composer for Maui Mallard in Cold Shadow and director of Werewolf by Night) is excellent. Until BF Bad Company came along, this was the best guns had ever sounded in a video game. So they had that crown for 2 years.

After this, Criterion went back to making racing games, which they're actually good at. Developers of Black went over to Codemasters and made a spiritual sequel, Bodycount. I remember it being pretty average, which is at least better than Black. Contemporary reviews loved this game. I never understood why. At least now I was able to get some enjoyment from the ridiculously pretentious opening cutscene, which is simply credits in the lower left of a black screen.

If you have a hankering to play a mid-2000s shooter with a focus on bombastic gunplay and a prominently-featured SPAS-12, make the right decision:

Play F.E.A.R.

2/10

I've had Solar Ash sitting here installed on my xbox for probably... 2 years? Even though I liked the look of it, I didn't feel motivated to play it, as it's a sequel (? prequel?) to Hyper Light Drifter. I also liked the look of HLD, but it was an absolute snooze to play... And yet I was idly sifting through my installed games, saw this, and looked it up on HowLongToBeat. Yes, I'll play a 6 hour game!

If I had known that this was essentially Shadow of the Colossus + Outer Wilds + Rail grinding, I wouldn't have taken this long to try it. That's a recipe for Larry bait! You put that shit under a cardboard box being held up by a stick, and I'm gonna be trapped within 20 seconds!

The gameplay loop is pretty simple: You wander around little hubs, destroying goop by hitting weak points in quick succession, and each one killed reveals a weak point on a big monster roaming around the area. Once you've killed all the goops, you can kill the colossus. You grapple onto them and do the same thing, hitting the designated spots on the way to their main weak point, and if you're too slow you have to restart. On occasion this can be frustrating, mostly due to the camera whipping around like a maniac while zoomed out about 400 miles away from your character. It usually works fine. You don't have much wiggle room in most cases, but there's no real penalty for getting knocked off, as areas are full of health pickups. There are also small enemies scattered around, which are never more than minor annoyances. This is fine, I guess, as it avoids the Prince of Persia Problem™ for the most part.

A really weird mechanic that I don't quite understand is how you pick up Plasma throughout the game, which is used to increase your max health. Your max health also decreases by 1 every time you beat a colossus, for story reasons. By the halfway point, I had a huge stock of plasma so after every boss I just had to top up to max health again. It's kinda just strange busywork, and I'm not sure what the point of it is. It would make sense if you could use the plasma to upgrade other abilities or something, but nah, just max health. Alright.

Anyway, if you're doing to do a riff on SotC it's important to nail the Vibes. Solar Ash got it. While it doesn't feature the same desperate loneliness and total lack of anything approaching humanity as SotC, it's much more similar to a Souls game. Your character is part of a crew that was sent to collapse a black hole that's threatening a nearby planet, and everyone here is either dead or insane. Interactions with NPCs range from tragic to darkly comic, but all of them are pitiable in their own ways. The end "twist" can be seen coming from about... 5 minutes into the game, but who cares, it all looks cool.

8/10

I would say that this has me looking forward to Hyper Light Breaker, but upon further research I have found that it is apparently going to be a roguelike. So, uh... I'll always have Solar Ash.

Mercenaries holds a certain vaunted status among a very particular group of people. Remembered for its bombast and freedom, exemplified by its subtitle "Playground of Destruction," its main claim to fame was being able to call in vehicles, weapons, and airstrikes wherever you are. Helldivers 2 owes a lot to Mercenaries in that respect.

However, the part nobody wants to talk about is how obscenely dull the game is otherwise. Missions are the most boring "go here, plant C4, defend this point" slop imaginable, to the point where they almost feel like they were procedurally generated. Side activities are populated almost entirely by checkpoint "races." Environments are shockingly barren, gunplay feels bad, and it features the most insane crosshair placement I've seen in any game that doesn't have "Halo" in its title. This game feels like it was made by aliens. The dialogue is unnatural and the controls are completely batshit (you also drive vehicles by pressing A to accelerate and X to brake).

The thing is, you could look at all of this stuff, and how it's an original Xbox/PS2 game, and think, "oh, it's just a very early open world game."

This came out in 2005.

TWO THOUSAND AND FIVE. The same year Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory came out. Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay had been out for a year. For more apples-to-apples comparisons, Hulk: Ultimate Destruction also released in 2005, and GTA San Andreas had come out a few months earlier. The Xbox 360 would arrive in November of 2005. This is just straight-up embarrassing.

Mercenaries did have one interesting concept, with the "Deck of 52" system. There were 52 enemies that were "high value targets" and could be captured to get extra money. It was sort of the precursor to the Nemesis system from the Mordor games, in a way, but most of them don't really stand out, and they're essentially just another collectible.

The legacy of Mercenaries, or at least the idealized version of what it represented, would thankfully be carried on by the Just Cause series, the worst entry in which is still far more fun to play than this. There was a Mercenaries 2, released in 2008, and I remember liking it. It was completely busted, and got a lot of flack for that, but I still remember it being much more enjoyable than the first game's utter slog.

3/10

thank you phil spencor for letting me play this shit game in 4k resolution on my x box series x you are a great man dedicated gtoo game presvertaion and i like thatyou wor e a bttletoads shirtgbnnnnn