This is a very good game, surprising how well it has aged. The guns feel weighty and powerful. The destructibility is incredible, something I was completely surprised by. The story is something I did not pay an iota of attention to. You're supposed to be a kind of spec ops guy who goes rogue? Not certain. All I really cared about was the gunplay. Which was pretty good! Good enough to go back and play? Maybe not. But I had a good time with it. I say that because, though probably among the best FPSs of its time, feels kinda bad to play now.

The fact that your screen goes blurry when you reload and that there's no proper aim-down sights but instead just a zoom in of holding it at your hip is annoying. Also the fact that every time you pull a gun out you have to do an animation. Nothing more infuriating than trying to swap to your shotgun because a guy is right on you and having to wait a second to finish fiddling with it.

Another issue is how often the game is just you spraying bullets into a guy who is standing still making the same flinching animation. A little tiring. Blowing the heads off of guys was fun but it could be very boring trying to take down a guy from far away with your AR. Still. despite all that, managed to have a fun time.

Each level is about an hour long which was perfect. No save states and some pretty unforgiving checkpoints makes it real annoying if you end up dying, which can easily happen on the later levels which was maddening. I also lost an hour's worth of gameplay because I forgot to save after mission end even though I made it back to the menu. Almost wanted to just delete the game after that. But had a great time completing an hour-long mission in the evening after work and then leaving the next mission for the next day, it was a good time! Would recommend if you're into older stuff.

Envelheceu muito melhor do que eu esperava. A jogabilidade é boa até (por mais que não esteja dentro dos padrões modernos), as fases são muito divertidas e a maior tristeza é que a campanha dura por volta de 4h.

Ele teve a fama de ser difícil, mas sinceramente, era a gente que não sabia muito como jogar. Não acho que é um jogo fácil, mas não é um difícil injusto. Você precisa misturar táticas de um shooter arcade com algo mais tático.

E quanto à história, ela é quase irrelevante. Por mais que exista alguma coisa, definitivamente o foco aqui não era uma criar uma trama incrível, o foco foi todo pro design de fases e a qualidade de produção audiovisual, que é o maior destaque do jogo, pra época.

Vale a pena pra quem já conhecia e pra quem não conhece. É uma experiência curtinha que deixa um gosto de "quero mais"

"Black" stands out as a remarkable achievement in the fifth-generation console era, boasting graphics that pushed the limits of the hardware and set a new standard for visual fidelity. The shooting mechanics are exceptional, offering tight controls and satisfying gunplay that make every firefight intense and exhilarating. In its time, "Black" was undoubtedly the best shooter game available, showcasing the capabilities of the era's consoles. While the story may be somewhat average, it still manages to deliver a cool and engaging experience that complements the action-packed gameplay. Overall, "Black" remains a standout title that continues to impress with its groundbreaking graphics and solid shooting mechanics.

It's great fun if you can enjoy it for what it is - style over substance. There's nothing special about the gameplay or the narrative. It's all about the explosions and destruction with bullets, bodies and debris flying everywhere.

I'd argue it's best enjoyed on normal or even easy. This was the first FPS I ever played with a gamepad back in the day, so I sucked really bad and had a tough time. Eventually, I came back and beat it on the hardest difficulty, more to prove a point than anything else. On this last playthrough I played on normal again and found it pretty lenient, but in a good way. You can afford to be sloppy and just go in all guns blazing like it says on the back of the box. On the harder difficulties you can't carry health packs, so you are forced to go more slow and steady and pick off enemies from afar, which is not a fun way to play what is ultimately a power fantasy game. You also don't have to worry about mandatory collectibles which can disrupt the flow of the experience. Leave those for subsequent playthroughs, if you are the completionist type. The game's super short anyway.

The story is not very original or interesting. Something about a deep black ops conspiracy. They throw so much military jargon at you that it's a bit hard to follow. I do like the visual style of the live-action cutscenes, though. The orchestral score is used sparingly, but it's really good at building tension or creating an epic feel.

I've seen people make the claim that this is the best FPS on PS2. I don't know about that, but it might very well be the most technically impressive one. Yeah, the lighting is all baked and the destruction is pre-calculated, but it looks great in motion, especially for the time and hardware. I played in 480p (activated by holding X and triangle while the game boots) and it does have some slowdown during heavy scenes, but it's fairly minimal considering the quality of the visuals. There's a widescreen mode, but you should avoid it, because it's just cropped-in 4:3.

there was a marketing line for Black - something along the lines of "Every Bullet is Your Baby." that is probably the best representation of Black you can ask for. outrageous, very surface level, extremely 2006, and, lets face it - really fun.

while parts of the game haven't aged particularly well - the control scheme is a little clunky, the graphics are very brown-grey (but with excellent particle affects!), and other parts of the game frustrates (some enemies are just the biggest bullet sponges), the game still feels great for all the reasons Burnout is fun to play. it doesnt take itself seriously, and you get to witness cool explosions has you hold the trigger for what seems like forever. there is a story, but while well presented and acted, it doesn't really matter, and can be safely ignored

i honestly wish there was a modern spiritual successor to Black. because, god is this game cool. and sometimes thats enough!

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

Let's start with what the game does right:
- The destruction physics are extraordinary, even compared to many shooters of the succeeding generation.
- The levels are unique, varied, and have cool set pieces.
- The shotgun is very satisfying to use. It's powerful and loud.
- ..... That's all I got.

Onto the negatives, there are a lot of them:
- The controls feel terrible. Your movement speed is slow and there is no run button. The aiming sensitivity is also very low with no option to change it.
- The weapon switching, reload and alternate fire mode animations take way too long. They break the flow of fire fights and add another layer of clunkyness on top of my previous issue.
- Enemies are bullet sponges which is the laziest way of adding difficulty to a game. At least head shots are one hit kills.
- The story is pretty bad, even for modern military shooter standards. Knowing the history of the game, you can really tell that it was hastily put together to connect a bunch of levels that have nothing to do with each other.
- While the graphical fidelity is impressive for the time, I wasn't a fan of the art direction. Everything is dark, brown and grey with a bit too much bloom. All things very common in the seventh gen so I guess Black really was ahead of it's time.
- Checkpoints are sparse considering the length of each level.
- Higher difficulties require completing more boring secondary objectives which are essentially just glorified collectibles. I tend to play shooters on the second highest difficulty my first time through but I switched to normal here just to avoid the secondary objectives.
- Game length is on the shorter side.

Black to me is a really good tech demo, just not a good game. I wish it had been released on PC. That would have solved the control issues for me at least and made it more enjoyable to play.