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.

An amazing technical showcase for what could be squeezed out of the 6th generation of consoles. Playing on modern Xbox hardware helps showcase Black's impressive destruction technology in a wide screen, HD picture. If you have the ability to play with great headphones or a surround system, Black additionally offers a robust sound profile with some of the meatiest, devastating sounding weapons of the generation. It is wild to see what Criterion was able to pull off in the last leg of the Xbox's life cycle, so much so this could easily be mistaken for an early 360 title at a glance.

The impressive tech and audio can only push Black so far, though. While it's understandable for the time considering we didn't quite have a universal FPS controller format, Black's controls can be a little confusing to get to grasp; amplified further if you're like me and are juggling this game alongside others. I honestly cannot think of another console shooter off the top of my head that uses the A/X button for a reload, and Y/triangle to equip suppressors, while you use the D-pad to swap weapons.

Once you finally have a grasp on Black's controls, you'll have to contend with its post-processing effects. I have different motion sickness triggers than others, but one thing that truly gets me feeling ill is excessive blur. Black, sadly, is chock-full of blur effects through its many reload animations. Yes, it is truly stunning to see the animation detail on each weapon's reload, but if you make the grave mistake of moving (especially turning) while reloading, you may find your stomach flipping over itself like me. This frequent camera blur is in addition to violent camera shakes on explosions, and bloom effects that border on the horrendous side of ugly. Motion sick and photosensitive people should approach Black with caution.

For a Game Pass title, the nearly 4 hours for a "normal" playthrough isn't so bad and is a bit of a joy in a market full of 20+hour minimum experiences. I can say that it's understandable why the short length would be an issue, especially at the time of release. Replaying the game is incentivized to get more collectibles and play with different weapons, but I could imagine running the same levels time and time again with the game's unskippable cutscenes and brutal, unfair checkpoints becoming a chore sooner than later. Black is an impressive shooter when taking a broad look at it, yet there isn't much of a "deep end" to immerse yourself in and get "genuine playtime" out of it.

Mon 1er FPS et ça claque du moins c'est pas le meilleur jeu non plus mais franchement . , une cinématique avec des vrais personnes utilisant des histoires sur les black ops dès le début du jeu on te met dans l'ambiance sur le fait que ça va péter .

Pas manquer après l'intro le 1er niveau se lance et t'annonce la couleur , des armes extrêmement réalistes sur le bruitage , le rechargement , le changement d'armes tout est misé sur le sonore et le spectaculaire pour " t'inciter à continuer le carnage jusqu'à la dernière balle ".

Pour le coup il n'y a pas beaucoup de niveaux c'est un peu frustrant mais ça fait le travail. La gestuel des ennemis me fera toujours autant rire , ils ont un corps élastique (imaginé une canette écrasé , bas là ça peut être pareil tout le corps se rapetisse , attention pas sanglant je préfère rassurer ).

Il fait pour moi parti d'un très bon jeu si tu veux tout défoncer mais après ça ne va pas plus loin , ça en fait son charme .

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.