Metareview: Black (PS2/Xbox)

EA's much trumpeted "gun porn" first-person shooter hits the shelves this week, so we thought it'd be a good idea to compile the thoughts of a selection of reviews from the web. Overall, Game Rankings gives Black a good score of 79%, but does it live up to the hype?

IGN (87/100) by Chris Roper - this interview can be summed up by the statement that Black "is everything you'd ever want in a shooter if all you ever wanted to do was shoot stuff". In other words Black is the Serious Sam of the PS2/Xbox (read: irrelevant plot, limited replayabilty but with plenty of pretty guns, gore and explosions to stop you from caring).

EuroGamer (80/100) by Kristan Reed - this review plays the statistics game to point out the hectic nature of the game. By the end of Black, reviewer Kristan Reed had killed a total of 2758 enemies equating to one kill every ten seconds. This kill count wasn't easily earned; the A.I. in Black is pretty tough. Unfortunately the lack of a plot to explain why the hell you have to kill all these people lets the game down. That plus the absence of a multiplayer mode and the occasional slowdown due to unoptimized code (or the PS2's aging hardware) means that Black doesn't quite fall into the genre defining category.

1UP (70/100) by Garnett Lee - "Do you like to blow stuff up?" If you do, then Black is the game for you. According to this review, Black elevates shooting things/blowing things up to an almost artistic level. But if you're looking for more of a Half-Life style experience from your shooters, Black won't satisfy you - unless you have the ability to switch off your brain.

Hmm... I pretty much thought Serious Sam *was* the Serious Sam of the Xbox / PS2. But what do I know? 8)

Black is pretty far from Serious Sam in reality. Sure, there are lots of people to kill and extravagant ways to do it, but it's far from the DOOM-like hordes in Serious Sam that blindly rush towards you.

If anything this feels like the original Medal of Honor without the WW2 setting and with more explosives. I love Black - and the Xbox version doesn't seem to have the slowdowns the PS2 suffers from (surprise surprise, eh?).

I'm kind of disappointed that there is no multiplayer, as the game is quite short multiplayer would of added some extra life to it.