Invalidated by time.

Woe betide Black, a tech demo that dropped on the PS2 and Xbox just in time for the next generation of consoles to hit the market. It’s never easy being the last one to the party, especially if you would have been a lot more impressive if you’d gotten there at the beginning rather than the end.

Black is not very good. In fact, Black kind of sucks. Black is the cursed kind of tech demo where the creators hyperfixate on one specific element to the detraction of everything else. The angle taken here is “gun porn”, though this philosophy doesn’t seem to extend far beyond the designs. The gun models look nice. They sound like cartoons when you slap a silencer on them. In order to make sure you’re constantly getting long, impressive looks at them, the game will apply a ridiculously heavy depth-of-field blur on everything except the gun whenever you go through your slow, slow reload animations. The firearms look pretty good by Xbox standards, but you have to keep in mind that the Xbox 360 had already been out for three months by the time that this released. It wasn’t going to be impressive for long. Hell, it was hardly impressive for the time. Call of Duty 2 was a launch title, and nearly every 360 owner had a copy. Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter came out not even a full month after Black. Sure, if you were still stuck on the old consoles, Black was alright. But it wasn’t as though more impressive choices didn’t already exist.

The good people at Criterion wanted to make a shooter with a focus on destruction, ala their Burnout titles, and they didn’t really succeed. It’s a little impressive to blow up a giant red barrel and make a building collapse, but the environmental destruction is so limited to specific spots that it makes the game world feel all the more artificial. Unless it’s clearly marked with a black reticle as being destructible, it can’t be destroyed. Given how outright bad these stages usually look in terms of visual fidelity — perhaps best described as Medal of Honor with godrays — it feels as though a lot had to be foregone to make this function, and it wasn't worth it.

But the controls, my god. You ever play a a game with mouse acceleration? The type of aiming system that dictates the faster you move your mouse, the faster your weapon will swing itself in a given direction? You know how it sucks, because it introduces unnecessary momentum to your character and makes the controls feel gummy? You know how no games other than Quake even come with the option to enable it anymore because of how awful it felt? Alright. Cool.

You ever play a game with control stick acceleration?

Trying to aim your gun in Black is an ordeal. There’s a particularly noxious mixture of aim assist and acceleration that guarantees that you’ll lock on to the general proximity of an enemy while still needing to sloooooowly nudge your sights along to actually hit them. Opposing soldiers seem to have an aura around them that extends in a radius a few feet around their body that’ll make your reticle light up, informing you that you can shoot them. The reticle lies. You need to be hovering directly around center mass to reliably hit anything, which makes me wonder why this targeting aura is as generous as it is. If I had to guess, it’s because the amount of dirt and debris that gets kicked up in a firefight makes it impossible to see anything, so your reticle has to fib a little to let you know that there are still hostiles around.

The Russians that you shoot at in this game must have been eating all of their veggies, because they are absolute tanks. They might be some of the spongiest enemies I’ve ever seen in a first-person shooter. Even on normal difficulty, most of these mooks can take thirty 5.56 rounds to the chest and keep running at you. Switching every weapon you can to single-fire and fishing for insta-kill headshots is infinitely more efficient than trying to spray them down, because you’ll have eaten up an entire double-stacked magazine before you can get through two people with body shots. Once the enemies with armor get introduced, any hope of taking them out with anything less than a headshot goes out the window; the worst thing an entire M249 belt will do to a guy with a hockey mask and a kevlar vest is knock him on his ass for a few seconds.

Your narrative here is borderline incomprehensible. I kept thinking that I was missing cutscenes or in-level dialog or something, but it really was just written as an afterthought. This was originally just going to be a series of missions with no connecting story to chain them together, and one had to be (obviously) hastily hacked out in order to provide some semblance of cohesion to all of this. It feels worse than having nothing. A little text blurb explaining what was your objective is on the mission select screen would have been significantly better than this weird, dream-like CIA espionage story that ends on an "and the adventure continues" hook despite nothing in the narrative having actually been resolved. Apparently, I had killed almost all of the leaders of the opposing terrorist cell. I wasn't aware that I'd done this, because the game didn't see it fit to inform me that blowing up a wall actually destroyed a secret bunker where they were all hiding that I never got to see.

The worst part about all of this, though — as I assume is the worst part for all of these boring tech demos — is that if you were willing to wait for just another year and a half, you could have been playing Modern Warfare. It should go without saying that regardless of how you personally feel about the Call of Duty series as a whole, Modern Warfare blows this out of the water in literally every single aspect: sound design, narrative cohesion, weapon models, controls, everything. I don’t feel that this is an unfair comparison to make, because the only real selling point of this game was the “gun porn” angle. That’s all. If eighteen months and a new console are all it takes for someone to make “your game but better”, then your game couldn’t have been that good to begin with. Why would you ever, ever bother playing Black today? What does it bring to the table that nothing else can? People are often willing to complain about games leaning too heavily into their gimmicks in an attempt to differentiate themselves from their contemporaries, but you know what’s worse than a game being gimmicky? A game being forgettable.

Being tasked with destroying evidence of government scandals as your secondary objective is cute, at least. "YOU DESTROYED A LIST OF CIA-FRONTED COMPANIES BASED IN EUROPE" is the kind of barb that you only get to fling if you don't rely on the DOD for the funding of your modern military project.