A story focused tactics game with an exceptional combat system brought down by repetitive level and mission design, under baked squad management and forced side missions with no story development.

The boss fights were also pretty unique for the genre and a nice change of pace.

There is a lot of potential for an amazing sequel. They just need to keep the same combat and flesh out the other systems surrounding it.

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.

A decent action rougelike with a unique pinball/rolling mechanic but lacking the depth crucial to the genre.

The best thing about the game is definitely how good the movement feels. Zipping around taking out enemies while switching between rolling, shooting and abilities without taking any damage is satisfying.

Unfortunately, after finishing one run you have pretty much seen everything the game has to offer. There are other characters, upgrades, abilities and guns to unlock but they don't really change the way you play that much. The levels are fairly simple and don't differ much from each other.

The soundtrack is absolutely terrible and the worst I have ever heard in a game. I can only really describe it as noise. This combined with the sound effects and bad audio mixing make it very grating to listen to.

I had some fun in my short amount of time with it but I don't feel motivated to continue playing and unlocking everything.

Incredibly fun and one of the best arcade racers.

Positives:
- Carnage filled high speed races.
- Fun Road Rage mode.
- Crash mode is unique and fun to puzzle out.
- A lot of content in the World Tour to complete.

Negatives:
- The rubberbanding AI is pretty egregious.
- Many long loading screens (Turbo mode in PCSX2 was a godsend).
- Any event involving the US Circuit Racer. It's difficult to control and crawls to a stop when grinding against walls, punishing you for racing agressively which is the entire point of the game.
- The track selection could be larger.

It's a decent platformer with with many collectibles and secrets to keep you busy.

Unfortunately the level design is bland, the difficulty too easy and the physics makes Mario feel slippery and unresponsive.

It can be a good introduction to new players of the series or platformers in general, but to me it was a bit disappointing and a step down from SMB3 and World. It's unfortunate that the next three 2D Mario games followed in the steps of this one so closely.

Puzzles! There are a lot of them, ranging from math to sliding blocks. A few of them can be frustrating, like ones with a mountain of text that end up being a trick question, but they are overall very well designed. The difficulty curve is a bit strange though. There are easy puzzles mixed in with difficult ones throughout the whole game, instead of them getting progressively harder.

The way the puzzles are integrated into the story and how they are given out is also very jarring.
"Can I enter the village?" "Sure, solve this puzzle."
"Have you seen this person?" "Maybe, first solve this puzzle."
"Hello, I'm looking fo-" "HEY, SOLVE THIS PUZZLE."

I also wasn't a huge fan of the story and felt the pacing was off. You spend a lot of time just walking back and forth talking to people with little of interest happening to advance the story. It starts picking up towards the end and tries to shake things up with a plot twist but I had figured it out by then and thought there was too much exposition. Thins also tend to happen out of nowhere which is a strange contrast to the logical nature of the puzzles.

The presentation was definitely a stand out. The art and animation are wonderful and combined with the London setting make the game feel very charming.

Even with all its faults it’s still a solid puzzle game and I had fun solving puzzles in short bursts throughout the day.

A nice arcade style rail shooter (mostly).

For me there a lot of good moments mixed in with some bad. The on rail sections were great - they are fast paced, exciting, control well and finish with tense boss fights. The game falters when it tries to switch things up. The dogfight sections are a bit clunkier and just aren't very fun. Aquas was also bad due to the Blue-Marine being slow and hard to aim. I'm guessing they wanted to add some variety, but that isn't really necessary in a game of this length and with the core rail shooter gameplay being so good.

I was initially disappointed by the short length once credits rolled but then I found out about the alternate routes and true ending which got me to do another playthrough. I was surprised to see I had only seen about half the stages. The route required for the true ending was fairly harder than my first playthough and provided a pleasant amount of challenge.

My only other criticism is the low frame rate and slowdown present. I would love to replay it at a smooth 60 fps, hopefully someone will get a patch working or maybe even a source port in the future. I'll have to give Star Fox 64 3D a go too.

I did enjoy my time with it and I am eager to try out some other rail shooters a go. It's a shame that the genre seems to have died out.