In "BLACK", you get a gun and can shoot people. Instead of seeing your character from behind or above, you see through their eyes, in a "first-person" perspective. A key feature this title is interactivity - for the first time, gamers will be able to press L1 instead of simply pressing Right Click to zoom in and out.

I'll admit to going into this a feeling little hopeful. The general consensus for nearly two decades now is that it was a pretty solid console fps, and I was eager to see how well Criterion managed the break away from their signature dish of highly destructive vehicular combat.
If any facet of Black whatsoever were even a little impressive, it's that they managed to create some surprisingly destructive environments for gen 6 hardware to chug away at. Enough smoke and particle effects to satiate a PS5 owner. The rest is just wretched lol. Character engagement feels like exploring the deep sea w/ these controls, input delay and general poor performance, and the levels themselves are about as disinterestedly laid out as possible despite being made of spit and paper. In no way surprised to learn that the connective story tissue in the form of grotesquely over-edited fmvs between levels was a last-minute addition. Interestingly the initial idea for relating the plot in-game was to have a radio-play-style voiceover spoken over a 'black'(oooh my god 😍😍) screen - would probably have been a little more interesting, but this is tedious enough as is. Let me drift a corner and wrap my car around a streetlamp or I'll just play Timesplitters instead.

Apesar de um bom FPS, acho superestimado.

Inegável a nostalgia que esse jogo carrega, principalmente pros Brasileiros, mas na minha cabeça o jogo era bem melhor do que realmente é. A jogabilidade do game é meio repetitiva e muitas vezes padrão, o sistema de mira chega dar agonia de tão "duro" e "travado". Também achei a história total superficial e genérica.
Apesar dos pesares, os gráficos e sons desse jogo envelheceram igual vinho, continuam funcionando até hoje, mesmo o game sendo de 2006. Indiscutivelmente esse jogo moldou/inspirou vários outros FPS consolidados (acho muito legal as cutscenes antes de começar as missões, no estilo "filme" com pessoas reais).

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

Pushed through it in the name of nostalgia...i thought it'd be a bit dated but still with a retro charm but man, talk about a game completely obliterated by the passage of time.
Awkward aiming, spongy enemies, bad pacing, difficulty spikes...to add insult to injury, the story is so obviously done as an afterthought, doesn't even try to be engaging or even make sense; kudos for bringing a little personality with the live action cutscenes, but those are so unbearably boring and, worst of all, UNSKIPPABLE!!!
Score isn't lower because of a few worthwhile ideas, such as the destructible environments, that bring some punch to the firefights, and the few hidden areas and paths in levels, showcasing at least a bit of effort in breaking the linearity of the experience. But, overall, you can do much better than this if you're picking a military FPS, or any FPS for that matter.

I often see this game called "ahead of its time". But considering what's ahead of it is a far too long era dominated by the most boring, bland, brown and gray modern war-battle shooters of all time, is that really saying anything?

The game is graphically impressive for the console it released on, and the shooting mostly feels pretty good, but almost everything else about this game is drab. The levels are ugly, the enemies are way too goddamn spongy, and the story is so boring, I just stopped listening during one cutscene and just listened to podcasts for the rest of Black's runtime. This is the kind of game that when it was over, I didn't hesitate to hit the delete button, get it off my console and out of my memory.

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.

ENG:

Black is a game about shooting, but I don’t think that’s a big mystery. The box art, depending on where you live, is either a box full of bullets or an M4 broken in pieces, behind the box says “GO IN ALL GUNS BLAZING” and when starting the game, you’re greeted with animations of guns shooting and reloading in the menu. The first thing you do in the game is shooting a shotgun, not to kill someone, but to open a door, and that’s the way you open doors. The act of shooting in Black feels great and the excellent sound design reinforces it even more. Guns sound powerful and reloading them sounds satisfying. Most shootouts don’t even have any soundtrack, so all that sounds are bullets flying, and when the gunfight ends and all the noise is gone, the brief seconds when the background blurs to show in detail how the gun is reloaded are, so to speak, erotic. Plus the character seems to enjoy itself in how it reloads certain guns; When reloading the MP5, it hits the gun with the mag before inserting it, and with the Magnum, the bullets are quickly shown forefront before putting them in the drum.

What Black wants is for you to enjoy shooting. This reminds of Criterion’s star franchise, Burnout, which all it wants is for you to enjoy driving, only this time cars are replaced with guns. Something both Black and Burnout share is that they’re unapologetically unrealistic. In the case of Burnout, some cars had wacky names like “Annihilator” and the world design wasn’t nor did try to be realistic. In Black, some guns have no sense from a realism standpoint, the most blatant examples being the AK-47, whose bullet casings are ejected from the wrong side so they jump to your face, and the M16, which isn’t even an M16 and whose small mag doesn’t have the capacity to carry 95 bullets. But being fair, every gun has a shit ton of ammo regardless of the size of the mag. Black doesn’t want to be realistic, it wants to be fun, and those who come looking for realism will be disappointed within the first ten minutes.

A single Spas-12 shot is enough to blow up a car, and some enemies are strategically placed in areas full of explosives or spots where when shooting them it is fairly easy to blow something up, and there are so many things that can be blown up that it’s overwhelming. Basically anything that isn’t a fixed texture can be exploded to a point that it becomes ridiculous in how many things can blow up and how easy it is to do so. All these details come together to make every shootout an espectacle full of visual effects. In his video on Die Hard: Vendetta, Tehsnakerer mentions that back then some games tried to imitate cinema, not in that they were literal movies as they try to be now, but in that they tried to turn into mechanics things typical from cinema, usually from the action genre, and when thinking about it, Black could perfectly be the playable version of a lesser John Woo action flick or a movie by the Michael Bay that made Bad Boys. In its best moments, it could be said that it resembles a console F.E.A.R.-like.

But even with the great shooting mechanics, it still has its flaws that do more bad than anything and, due to how simple of an experience it is, overshadow the things the game is good at. The story is bad, is poorly told, almost nonexistent and completely disjointed from what you do in-game. While everything you do when playing is shooting, the cutscenes bore you with stuff about terrorism and covert operations that are uninteresting at best, and skipping the cutscenes make no trouble to understand what's going on when playing. Controls can make the game have some difficulty spikes due to how imprecise the joystick is, so when using the revolver or the sniper you’ll have to be careful. The enemies are absolute bullet-sponges, which is somewhat balanced thanks to the exorbitant amount of ammo you’re given, but when many enemies pile up at the same time it can become frustrating. The worst thing of all, and what almost spoils the game for me, is that the challenge doesn’t evolve past the first missions, repeating itself constantly with rather boring shootouts and repeating many situations already seen in previous missions. Even though with its fair share of flaws, there are like three or four first person shooters on the PlayStation 2 that are worth playing, and Black is lucky to be one of them.

ESP:

Black es un juego sobre disparar, aunque no creo que eso sea un gran misterio, la verdad. La carátula, dependiendo de donde vivas, es o una caja de balas o una M4 troceada, detrás de la caja dice “NO DEJES UNA BALA POR DISPARAR” y al abrir el juego, lo que hay en el menú son animaciones de armas disparando y recargando. Lo primero que haces en todo el juego es disparar una escopeta, pero no para matar a nadie, sino para abrir una puerta, y es así como se abren las puertas. El acto de disparar en Black se siente genial y el excelente diseño de sonido lo refuerza aún más. Las armas suenan potentes y las recargas suenan satisfactorias. La mayoría de tiroteos no tienen música, así que todo lo que suena son las balas volando, y cuando un tiroteo termina y todo el ruido se va, los breves segundos al recargar en los que el escenario se desenfoca para mostrar detalladamente cómo el arma se recarga son, por decirlo de algún modo, eróticos. Además de que el personaje parece recrearse en la manera en que recarga según qué armas; Al recargar la MP5, golpea el cargador con el arma antes de ponerlo, y con el Magnum muestra las balas en primer plano rápidamente antes de meterlas en el tambor.

Lo que Black quiere es que disfrutes disparando. Esto recuerda a la saga estrella de Criterion, Burnout, donde lo que se quiere es que disfrutes conduciendo, solamente que esta vez se cambiando los coches por pistolas. Algo que comparten Black y Burnout es que son descaradamente inverosímiles. En el caso de Burnout, algunos coches tienen nombres tontorrones como “Annihilator” y el diseño del mundo no es ni intenta ser realista. En Black, algunas armas no tienen ningún sentido desde un punto de vista realista, siendo los casos más descarados el AK-47, cuyos casquillos de bala se expulsan por el lado que no es y te saltan en la cara, y la M16, que ni es M16 ni su mini-cargador tiene la capacidad de llevar 95 balas. Aunque siendo justos, todas las armas tienen un porrón de munición independientemente del tamaño de su cargador. Black no quiere ser realista, quiere ser divertido, y quién venga buscando realismo se va a llevar una decepción en los primeros diez minutos.

Un único disparo de Spas-12 es suficiente como para volar un coche por los aires, y algunos enemigos se ubican en lugares rodeados de explosivos o en posiciones donde al dispararles es fácil provocar una explosión, y hay tantas explosiones que abruma. Prácticamente cualquier cosa que no sea una textura fija se puede explotar, llegando a un punto que resulta ridícula la cantidad tan grande de cosas que se pueden hacer explotar y lo fácil que es. Todas estas cosas se suman para hacer que todos los tiroteos sean un espectáculo de efectos en pantalla. En su vídeo sobre Die Hard: Vendetta, Tehsnakerer comenta que entonces algunos juegos intentaban imitar al cine, no el es sentido de ser literales películas como ahora, sino en que intentaban convertir en mecánicas cosas típicas de películas, por lo general de acción, y si uno lo piensa, Black sería algo así como la versión jugable de una película de John Woo venida a menos o del Michael Bay de Dos Policías Rebeldes. En sus mejores momentos se podría decir que es como un F.E.A.R. consolero.

Pese a que es un juego cuyas mecánicas de disparo son geniales, tiene un puñado de cosas que le hacen más mal que bien y que, debido a lo simple de la experiencia, hacen sombra a las cosas en las que el juego es bueno de verdad. La historia es mala, está mal contada, es casi inexistente y está completamente desconectada de lo que haces en el juego. Mientras todo lo que haces al jugar es disparar, en las cinemáticas te sueltan rollos de terrorismo y operaciones encubiertas que no interesan de nada y aburren, y no haría ninguna diferencia si decides saltarte las cinemáticas. Los controles pueden llegar a hacer a la experiencia un poco cuesta arriba debido a la poca precisión que tiene el joystick, y si quieres usar el revolver o el francotirador vas a tener que tener cuidado. Los enemigos son auténticas esponjas de balas, lo cual se compensa con la cantidad desorbitada de munición que te dan, pero si se acumulan muchos enemigos puede acabar siendo un poco insufrible. Lo peor de todo, y lo que termina de casi arruinarlo para mi, es que el desafío apenas evoluciona pasado las primeras misiones, redundando constantemente con tiroteos anodinos y reciclando muchas situaciones de misiones anteriores. Aún con su puñado de fallos, en la PlayStation 2 hay como tres o cuatro shooters en primera persona que merece la pena jugar, y Black tiene la suerte de ser uno de ellos.

Para a época e em consoles, era algo bem avançado

Inegavelmente bom e foi um jogo extremamente a frente do seu tempo levando em consideração os concorrentes em consoles. História clichê sim, mas que funcionava de uma forma excelente.

A gameplay nunca foi o melhor dele, pois é travada e lenta (o que é o arremesso de granada? Parece que o cara tá jogando um paralelepípedo de tão pesado que parece ser).

Agora, na parte visual e de áudio ele dava um show e, até hoje, faz isso muito bem. Todas as fases são legais e apresentam um bom desafio e é um jogo curto que entretém.

Com certeza ele possui a fama de hoje em dia atrelada a nostalgia, pq foi sim um jogão lá atrás.

Great graphics, average gameplay
In terms of graphics, Black is truly impressive for a PS2 game. The effects are fantastic and parts of the levels can be destroyed. Black doesn't limit this destruction to just explosive barrels or shattered windows. You can also shoot new passages into walls or even blow up half of a building. Explosions often chain together, filling the screen with explosions, especially in minefields. Enemy bunkers can be destroyed with grenades or rocket launchers. These are all great details, but here lies the biggest issue with Black: All these features are unfortunately hardly relevant in terms of gameplay. While you can occasionally create new pathways through walls, the game doesn't create interesting scenarios with this mechanic. And even though it's cool to blow up half of a building with explosive tanks, gameplay-wise, it's not more relevant than a regular red barrel.
Yet, despite the fact that the core of the game is just an average shooter, it kept me entertained throughout the entire (and thankfully relatively short) campaign. Even though it might not have much gameplay significance, it's still satisfying to blast doors open with a shotgun. However, many things are unfortunately limited to being a great idea, but nothing more.

Pretty generic, and the story is skip-worthy (yet you can't skip the cutscenes), but this is a solid shooter. The weapons all feel punchy and have some of the best sound design in any shooter. The level of difficulty is great too. The hardest difficulties are a major challenge, especially since there's no regenerating health, but are quite rewarding and feel fair except for maybe a couple of brief areas, usually involving one-shot kill RPGs. It's the little details that really make BLACK shine though, like the background going out of focus while you reload, the bullet casings that litter the ground after you fire (which most modern games still don't have for whatever reason), and even the fact that you can break windows just by walking into them with your gun, something I don't think I've ever seen another game get right.

Melhor jogo FPS no PS2 e que apresenta os melhores gráficos dentro das limitações do PS2. Jogo que não enrola e que te coloca direto na gameplay para começar a atirar sem cerimônia alguma. O jogo tem uma trama ok que dá mais detalhes nas cenas de live action no início de cada fase.

Certas mecânicas do jogo envelheceram mal como os comandos que não seguem os padrões dos FPS atuais com Iron Sight e gatilho no R2 e possui certos bugs que podem atrapalhar a progressão do jogo. Outro coisa que é meio estranha no jogo é o sistema de dano dos inimigos que as vezes tem que gastar um pente inteiro para derrubá-lo.

Ainda assim o jogo não perde o seu brilho e ainda ostenta a fama de ser um dos melhores FPS da geração do PS2 e com proposta muito convicente.

Never got around to playing this back in the day but I was always somewhat interested. Finally blasted through it in one night. Took me a mere 4 hours to go thru the 8 missions of the game. Not much replay value just a few higher difficulties and a few collectibles I missed.
Pros: graphics look great for the time, all the guns feel great, good feedback hitting enemies, fast paced with constant ammo and health pick ups let you constantly push forward spraying and chucking grenades. Buildings, cars, glass, doors, walls are all destructible and there’s constant debris and smoke across the battlefields. Gun play feels great.

Cons: way too short, no replay value, levels are pretty repetitive, nothing to really set it apart from other shooters. The grenade throw motion sucks. Really would have benefited from some split screen or death match modes.

All and all I enjoyed my time but just another shooter that I probably would never play again but I’m glad I got thru it once.

Anytime FPS games are discussed for the PS2, BLACK will always come to mind.

This game does exactly what it wants to do. It's a no nonsense, down to the grit FPS game.

The game runs around a total of 7 hours, and I think the pacing is pretty good. It offers some stealth but generally this is full on action and explosions from the start to the end. The stealth feels half-baked and just not really put in with much development on it.

The levels are mostly unique and have their own feeling, and the design is pretty damn good, it just flows so well. People always talk about the guns of this game but the levels themselves are really well done and amplify this game.

Now, on the guns, yep, it's awesome. Every gun feels and sounds distinct, they sound visceral and impactful. I think almost every gun I used was fun to play around with. gunfights fill the room with smoke and havoc, it feels exciting. The gunfights are just excellent here.

Now the story, as you may expect from a PS2 FPS game, is bad. It is hard to follow and overall very forgettable, it also ends on a cliffhanger for a sequel that doesn't exist sadly. But y'know, the story isn't really important here.

Also a minor complaint, the friendly soldiers you travel with feel pretty useless, they kill an enemy here and there but generally this feels like a one man army game, you vs a million Russians.

If you're into the FPS genre I'd say give it a try.