Metareview: Black (PS2/Xbox)

February 28th, 2006, 01:43 Posted By: wraggster

EA's much trumpeted "gun porn" first-person shooter hits the shelves this week, so we thought it'd be a good idea to compile the thoughts of a selection of reviews from the web. Overall, Game Rankings gives Black a good score of 79%, but does it live up to the hype?

IGN (87/100) by Chris Roper - this interview can be summed up by the statement that Black "is everything you'd ever want in a shooter if all you ever wanted to do was shoot stuff". In other words Black is the Serious Sam of the PS2/Xbox (read: irrelevant plot, limited replayabilty but with plenty of pretty guns, gore and explosions to stop you from caring).

EuroGamer (80/100) by Kristan Reed - this review plays the statistics game to point out the hectic nature of the game. By the end of Black, reviewer Kristan Reed had killed a total of 2758 enemies equating to one kill every ten seconds. This kill count wasn't easily earned; the A.I. in Black is pretty tough. Unfortunately the lack of a plot to explain why the hell you have to kill all these people lets the game down. That plus the absence of a multiplayer mode and the occasional slowdown due to unoptimized code (or the PS2's aging hardware) means that Black doesn't quite fall into the genre defining category.

1UP (70/100) by Garnett Lee - "Do you like to blow stuff up?" If you do, then Black is the game for you. According to this review, Black elevates shooting things/blowing things up to an almost artistic level. But if you're looking for more of a Half-Life style experience from your shooters, Black won't satisfy you - unless you have the ability to switch off your brain.

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