A very memorable experience that is sort of a mix between platforming and adventure games. Great art, story, dialogue and level design. My only complaint is that the platforming can be frustrating due to wonky collision detection like on ledges and ropes.

I used the following to improve the experience on modern systems: set compatibility mode to Windows 95, ThirteenAG Widescreen Fix, 2021 HD AI Upscale and Cutscenes texture mod on Nexus.

The one technical problem that I couldn't fix was a "popping" sound that happened when playing some sounds, especially those that played in loops like the levitation ball.

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.

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.

I never had a gaming experience ruined by a checkpoint system before.

I should actually call it a teleport system, because when you die you don't restart the level from the last checkpoint, you just teleport back with the enemies you killed staying dead. This means that difficulty is irrelevant since you can just brute force your way forward. They tried to mitigate this by implementing a score system that penalizes deaths but that is only relevant if you care about scores, which I do not. This all wouldn't be a problem if they included an option to play with them on or not.

Everything else about the game is pretty solid but I completely lost my desire to play after this.

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.

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.