25-Aug-2005 BlackHawk Down - tactical masterpiece or fire and forget? It seems strange that a game supposedly hot on tactical action opens with you sitting on a truck with a huge machinegun mowing down millions of tiny dots in the distance. It also seems somehow fitting that the first person you get to shoot is a civilian woman. Of course, you don't have to shoot her. In fact, if you do, it's Game Over. But you will anyway.
As soon as you're over the urge to mow down innocent civilians the game starts to worry you with its depressingly low-budget feel. This is a squad-based military shooter set in Mogadishu, which we're reliably informed is the capital of the lawless African state of Somalia. The story covers the US raids on the Somali warlords during the early 1990s and your team will be heading out to kick some warlord ass and save the day for Uncle Sam in typical gung-ho fashion. USA! USA!
RESTORE HOPE The graphics are never more than average and occasionally droop to laughable, with badly-modelled helicopters flying through sparse mountains and dead bodies that prefer to hover in mid-air than lie flat upon the ground where they fell. Even the vehicles glide about unconvincingly like pissedup ice-skaters. The whole game ends up looking like an unusually violent episode of Thunderbirds.
Your squad - while reasonably intelligent and responsive to enemy fire - are hideous to look at and move about in a random, skittery, strange fashion, like inquisitive spiders in ill-fitting combat suits. They also seem to often have a far better sense of what's happening on the battlefield than you do, and are seemingly able to spot enemies way out of your own limited visual range. In fact we often found that using their tracer fire was the most effective way of locating enemy troops. Sadly though, they have very little sense of self-preservation and seem quite content to stand immediately in front of you as you're sniping, resulting in death for them and another trip to the Game Over screen for you. The enemies attack without any real tactics and will happily hang about in the open waiting to be shot. With a sniper rifle at hand, it's often possible to wipe out an enemy camp single-handedly.
FOLLOW THE LEADER The missions are essentially ultra liner affairs: "Go HERE do THAT, no not THAT, THAT, stop it, go to your room..." However, there's a cheeky attempt to hide this linearity by letting you wander off the beaten path, only to be shouted at by your commanding officer if you go too far up that hill, or swim in that river, or accidentally fall off that bridge. It's an invisible wall in a funny hat and it's no less offensive than the real thing. In fact, it's possibly worse considering the repetitive nature of the speech you get for passing beyond the invisible boundaries. War doesn't suddenly get cancelled because you're standing in the wrong place, so why spend so much time trying to make everything super-realistic only to shatter the illusion by shoehorning players through such a narrowly-defined experience?
There are some clever features here - voice recognition for giving commands to your troops for example, and the unprecedented 32-man online game both add some extra interest. But they can't compensate for the fundamentally flawed nature of the single-player game. If more time had been spent polishing the graphics, enemy intelligence, animation and, erm, just about every other aspect of presentation, the good ideas could've had a chance to shine. Sadly, instead what we have is just another bloody war game, and not even a very good one at that.
PSW Staff
// Overview
Verdict
A disappointing attempt at a realistic squad combat game.
There are some good ideas but overall it feels shoddy.
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