Blacklight: Tango Down (Review)

I’m going to digress for a moment:

If there’s one thing that could completely turn me off from a multiplayer shooter, it’s the amount of bullets it takes to kill somebody. Example: In Uncharted 2, why the hell does it take an entire clip of bullets from an assault riffle the take down an old man in a t-shirt? Yes, I understand that Uncharted 2 isn’t trying to be some realistic military-shooter. But when I get behind someone on the enemy team and start spraying bullets into their back, only to have them turn around AS I’M SHOOTING THEM and blow me away with one shotgun blast, I do not like your multiplayer game. No thank you. My friend, who was playing the game with me at the time, told me that I needed to shoot them in the head. Fuck you. No I don’t. That dude is wearing a button-up t-shirt.

We’re going to need more bullets

Now I’m not saying that I feel this way about all games that require you to expel a boatload of bullets into your enemies. In games like Halo or Gears of War it makes perfect sense. In those games you play as elite future soldiers equipped with very heavy-looking armor. While neither of those games are strangers to a one-shot kill, it’s still understandable that it will take numerous bullets to take one of these guys down.

Blacklight: Tango Down is also a futuristic game featuring futuristic future soldiers. These guys have armor that looks strikingly similar to the ODSTs in the Halo universe. They can jump fairly high, fall from decent heights without taking damage, as well as run pretty quickly. They even have high-tech helmets that allow them to see enemies, friendlies, and environmental objects through walls. But god-forbid an enemy trooper just so much as looks at you the wrong way, you will die. During my first round of Team Deathmatch, I wasn’t even aware that I was being shot at until I saw my heavily armored character fly across the screen like 1200 Microsoft points being pissed into the wind. What’s the point of the high-tech gear if you would die just as quickly if you were bare-assed? Why not be bare-assed? Why not have 16 players fighting each other wearing only their HRV (Hyper-Reality Visor) helmets with their junk flopping in the air like the shower fight from the movie Eastern Promises? It would give new meaning to “tea-bagging” your victims, that’s for sure.

Poor guy…

If your character can be disposed of in a blink of an eye, there must be some pretty intense weaponry in this game, right? Eh. Standard military-shooter fare. You’ve got your pistols, SMGs, LMGs, assault riffles, sniper riffles, and shotguns. They all shoot bullets, not lasers. Honestly, the only “weapon” in this game that are truly futuristic are the special grenades. The digi-grenade is similar to a smoke grenade, except instead of smoke it releases reality-distorting pixels. It’s definitely quite cool to see for the first time, but eventually you’ll realize that it’s completely useless. You can’t see into the pixel -explosion and you can’t see out of it. It doesn’t really work as cover because most of the maps are simply a series of corridors, you will just as soon get caught on wall than make your way to safety. The EMP grenade is a different story, because any every enemy in the blast radius will get receive a temporary “blue screen of death” in their HRVs, leaving them open for you to blow upon. The drawbacks to the grenades is that they are shockingly inaccurate and they bounce off of objects like they were made out of rubber. You would not believe how many times I’ve thrown a frag grenade only to have it bounce off of a stair and propel directly into my face.

Now what is cool, all of the guns are customizable. Parts, such as scopes, stocks and magazines, can switched, swapped fine-tuned to your liking. You can also change the camouflage of your weapon as well as add little key chain-like trinkets that effect your character’s overall stats. These pieces are rewarded to you as you gain experience and rank up, but sadly the upgrades are not weapon specific. So let’s say you use nothing but assault riffles; you may not see an upgrade for your favorite weapon class for quite some time but you’ll get plenty of parts for the sniper riffle, which happens to be the only primary weapon that doesn’t seem to decimate anyone in a heartbeat.

If you have an SDTV, get a different game.

My main problem with this game is that I have to constantly stop myself from forgiving its numerous mistakes because of its price point and delivery platform. This is a $15 dollar download-only multiplayer game, AKA, budget-shooter. So it’s OK that this game has one incredibly annoying song that plays in every menu and loading screen in the game. It’s not a problem that the woman who gives Blacklight information throughout the Black-Ops co-op campaign sounds like she recorded her lines the very second she awoke from a heavy night of drinking because hey, it worked for Michael Ironside in Splinter Cell: Conviction. It’s cool that half the time that I search for a match the game tells me SEARCH SUCCEEDED while nothing happens for five minutes. And really, I didn’t expect them to include an easier way for me to play with my friends beside entering a lobby and frantically scream, “JOIN NOW BEFORE THE MATCH FILLS UP! HURRY! SHIT, IT’S FILLED!” Also, why would I even want to see how many experience points I have? Who cares about what those three bars under my weapon stats mean? Why would I even complain about the enemy AI in Black-Ops mode either stares at me and does nothing or kills me god-like accuracy while I’m in cover? What do mean, you want to know why there’s crazy Order people called “The Infected” that come charging at you will giant steel poles? This game’s only $15, man. You should be grateful that they even gave you a 4-player co-op mode in addition to it’s 7 game modes and 12 maps for that price!

BUT I’VE GOT NEWS FOR YOU:

I can name two games, that you can get for dirt cheap on Steam, that I’ve invested hundreds of hours of my life into playing on one map and in one game mode: Counterstrike: Source and Team Fortress 2.

In closing:

What Blacklight: Tango Down does have going for it is a really great, sci-fi atmosphere and a vast amount of customization and ultimately, personalization. Multiplayer games that allow to pick everything from my character’s color to stock of my SMG are the kind of games I wish there were more of. The HRV is another welcome and necessary addition seeing as everybody who plays this game wants to camp outside your spawn point. The HRV levels the playing field and keeps the action moving.

What Blacklight: Tango Down has against it: A silly name and generic game. Another thing that people used to the reward system in games like Modern Warfare 2 and Battlefield: Bad Company 2, in this game you actually have to kill things to level up. No points are given to you for running or fixing tanks. There is no fixing. It’s kill or be killed.  This is the future, dawg. Get real.

This is the enemy camping your spawn point.

While I don’t think the game is total waste of $15 dollars, there’s certainly better ways to spend it. If you’re looking for a great downloadable shooter for your Xbox 360 or PS3, pick up Battlefield 1943. If you’re a PC gamer, skip this altogether. Here’s hoping that developer Zombie fixes some of the salvageable problems, because with a few gameplay play adjustments and some interface fixes, we could be looking at a much better game. The setting is there, the world is intriguing but in its current state, this game is simply average.

5/10

This game was reviewed on the XBox 360