It's new to me: Black

A developer known for destructive car games made a first-person shooter that also focused on destruction.

This column is “It’s new to me,” in which I’ll play a game I’ve never played before — of which there are still many despite my habits — and then write up my thoughts on the title, hopefully while doing existing fans justice. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

Criterion Games likes going big. That’s not news or anything, it’s part of what makes the Burnout games such a successful franchise for them and Electronic Arts in the first place. But it’s also the design philosophy behind their turn at a first-person shooter, 2006’s Black, which released for the Playstation 2 and Xbox. While the PS2 would persist on for a few years yet, 2006 was also when the Playstation 3 released, and the Xbox 360 had already come out in 2005: the next gen was still en route, in terms of the games to come, but it was also already there by the time Black hit shelves.

Rather than release as an early-life title on those new, hi-definition systems, Criterion focused on extracting every bit of power it could out of the soon-to-be-previous-gen systems to make Black look stunning for the hardware. Sure, there’s some emptiness in the design — lots of rooms that seem unfurnished or unfinished where you know that, even a few years later, they would have been full of details that gave them life — but that was more a product of the design of the time than of the power of the Xbox and PS2: Black isn’t much different than the PS3 launch title Resistance: Fall of Man, in this regard. Visually, even, it’s not that much different. It might not even have been more impressive, visually and graphically, if Criterion had released it on the Xbox 360 and PS3 instead: it’s their familiarity with the hardware that allowed Black to look as detailed as it did in the first place. So, now it has a legacy of “wow, look what they did with this older tech” instead of “well, the graphics sure did improve over time,” a la later Resistance titles compared to the original launch edition.

Black also serves as something of a closing of the loop opened by Volition’s Red Faction at the start of the gen. Volition’s Geometry Modification System, or Geo-Mod, was used to make the environments destructible. Not just some environments, but a whole mess of them, which you could also make a mess of. You could make alternate paths to get around security forces by blowing a hole in a wall and basically tunneling your way around. You could decide this locked door is annoying to open, and make your own next to it by blowing out the wall it’s attached to, or, make a pathway you can climb by leveling it out into a new road or “stairs” of a sort. Very versatile, but also very ambitious for the time relative to the release of the Playstation 2, as they both landed in 2001, so it’s more effective than it is pretty. There’s something poetic about the brute force nature of it all matching up philosophically and visually, but still.

Image credit: MobyGames

Black also puts a ton of emphasis on destruction, and it all looks as satisfying as it feels this time around. Now, it’s not quite as open as Red Faction’s setup, where you were on a mining planet full of tunnels waiting to be found by blowing up this wall or that one, but you can still take a look at a hallway, see some soldiers assembled you don’t want to hit head on, and decide that hey, this door can be blasted through with a shotgun, so let’s detour and circle around them. Or, hey, that truck is carrying explosive materials, let’s blow it up and watch everyone using it as cover and also the ground around it pay for that mistake. Or, just something as simple as it being kind of funny to watch a soldier topple over a railing after you’ve taken them out, and then crash through a whole bunch of glass windows, shattering them and anything they happen to land on afterward.

It’s not about exploration like it was in Red Faction, but it is a little closer to what Volition’s model would evolve to by the time of Red Faction: Guerrilla. Which is to say that you’re encouraged to blow everything up and break everything that you see, for the sheer spectacle and utility of it. The first room you’re in features a locked door and no way of opening it, save one. There’s a shotgun next to it, and an implication there, and you’re correct for picking it up and firing that assumption right into the door. Your character is described as a hothead unfamiliar with the concept of collateral damage, neither of which is a compliment in-game, but it is encouragement for you, the player, to properly role play as this guy who likes solving problems with rocket-propelled grenades. I would have said “RPGs,” but let’s use the full-term the first time around to avoid confusion or the implication that Black’s protagonist, Jack Kellar, has anywhere near the patience necessary for a role-playing game.

The destruction is great fun and offers you quite a bit of freedom in how you want to tackle a given situation, too. Here’s one gameplay example, when you’re given a sniper rifle to handle a number of enemy soldiers outside the building that you’re in. You can shoot them all individually, but that’d require using most or all of the rounds you’ve got, depending on how accurate of a shot you are. Or, you could look around for environmental assistance, in this case, some tanks that could explode and take out some reinforcements, and a giant metal storage container hanging from a ceiling right above some hunkered down foes.

Notice, too, all the windows breaking as the sniper rifle itself (not its bullets!) punches through them, and as enemy fire comes into the building in response to your own shots.

The end result? Besides diversity of actions, you also have a few more rounds left for when you find another spot where holing up with a sniper rifle will make your life much easier. The explosive kills aren’t just for show: they can also be efficient, or just kind of funny. Hey, it’s not my fault that a bunch of enemies decided they were going to take up position inside of a minefield, which I could set off by shooting a mine from a distance and watching them all blow like very dangerous dominoes.

For all of the explosions, for all of the detail to the guns you use that the developers themselves labeled as “gun-porn” — especially noticeable if you’re playing the game in upscaled HD on a Series X — the sound is the bit of tech that you’re going to notice the most in Black. Don’t worry, I’m not skipping over how gross “gun-porn” sounds both audibly and morally, it’s a repugnant idea to be That Into Firearms in any capacity really, but just in terms of grading Criterion on accomplishing their visual mission here. They did it, and well. Those guns look incredible, and like the terrifying weapons of mass death dealing that they are. So, that’s settled, let’s talk sound.

The sound in Black makes everything just seem so big. Every shot fired, every explosion, the comms chatter, the enemies yelling out “granata!” in Russian when you lob a grenade near them, the process of reloading a shell into a shotgun, all of it just sounds big, and loud, and like it’s happening in your living room for real. Listen to the game for a minute, hear what’s somehow organized, understandable sound when it should be a cacophony, and you’ll understand why Criterion was nominated for and won awards for the sound in Black.

Criterion describes the sound you hear as a “choir of guns.” Basically, each gun you use in a game can have a different sound, and Criterion took it a step further by utilizing that for your weaponry, sure, but for those of the enemies, things were much different. Chris Sweetman, audio director for Black, explained the process on Criterion’s own site.

Weapon sounds are made up of literally dozens of different elements. There might be a chamber click or the attack of an explosion pitched up and mixed in but one key factor that you have to be aware of is clutter.

Too many sounds in the mix just dilute the impact of the weapon so it's important to be willing to take away elements that are not adding anything to the mix.

The majority of FPS never gets it right. You have too many sounds and music all jostling for position and it ends up sounding a complete mess. We were determined that this was not going to happen to Black.

One of the key areas for us in achieving the ultimate mix was the "choir of guns."

The premise here is that each enemy firing at you should be a member of a choir. He should have his own distinct voice and when played with other members of the choir it should be a harmony - not cacophony.

The norm in games is that if you are faced with 3 enemies these 3 enemies will use exactly the same weapon sample (because they are using exactly the same weapon model). So you have 3 guys all firing an AK47 in close proximity. The result is a complete mess.

We decided early on to break with tradition and create a system which would allow us to disregard what weapon model was being used and create a sonically exciting fire fight.

The system is incredibly simple (I find the best ideas always are). We would disregard the weapon model and assign each enemy a different timbre of weapon.

So one guy would have a low weapon, another would have a middle and the last guy would have a high. What this gave us was unparalleled clarity in the mix. You can hear distinctly in 3d space where each enemy is firing from and this not only aids the mix it also gives you clear feedback from the game on where you are being fired at from.

Before you even see the trajectory of an incoming RPG, you likely know where it’s coming from thanks to this mixing. If you’re paying attention, you won’t miss out on these sonic clues. It’s also not the only one for determining where shots are coming from: if they’re hitting you, you do receive a half-circle red notification of where the shot came from in the middle of your screen. However, not every fired shot is hitting you, either, so this “choir of guns” allows you to determine where someone who sees you, but you don’t see them yet, is hiding. And lets you plan your counterattacks from there.

It all works so seamlessly that without even knowing this kind of system was in place, you’re able to benefit from it. You start to feel it, and respond accordingly, even if you don’t know precisely what the source is. Learning about how they achieved that, after the fact? Again, it’s no wonder Black got recognition for its sound and audio design.

Not everything in Black works perfectly, though. The level design is a lot of fun in terms of it being a bit open to how you want to approach a particular engagement, but overall there’s nothing particularly special here in the gameplay. It sounds amazing, it looks nearly as good, and it all feels great, especially with vibration on how to match that impressive sound. But the actual level design falls a little flat in some places. Not enough to make it a bad game or even a boring one, by any means. Enough, though, that it’s probably a good idea that this game that was referred to as “short” for taking four hours had that kind of runtime in the first place. There weren’t enough level design ideas here to sustain anymore than that, and choosing to include two tougher difficulties that asked for more of you in terms of both skill and exploration was the correct call for lengthening the game beyond its initial campaign time.

You have primary objectives, which are always shifting as you complete them: the mission isn’t over until it’s over sort of thing. There are also secondary objectives that are a mix of optional and required. You need to complete a certain number of them in order to successfully conclude a level, but the rate depends on your difficulty level. This isn’t on the level of, say, Perfect Dark, where there is more to do in each stage depending on how challenging you’ve set things. But is instead more like raising the threshold: for example, on Normal, in the first level, you need to complete one of eight optional objectives to proceed to the next stage, but on Hard, that number climbs to four of eight. Later Normal stages require three completed, the number still climbing on Hard. And in addition to that, you also don’t have the ability to store health packs on Hard and above (the last and most challenging difficulty setting is Black Ops, which doesn’t even unlock until you complete the game on Hard first).

Those health packs can be carried with you, up to three at a time, and utilized when you want by pressing down on the D-pad. Your only other option for restoring health are first aid kits that fallen enemies sometimes drop, and they only recover a little bit. Which is a lot of what makes the Hard level, well, hard. The endless bullets and waves of foes, that’s always there, even on Normal. But the need to avoid bullets because you can only recover so much damage per stage? That’s more for the challenging modes.

There are times where you want to be a little stealthier — you’ll start these stages with a suppressor on your starting firearm, a hint to sneak around a bit — but every one of these eventually devolves into a huge, explosive firefight. The second level starts you off with a silenced handgun, and that works for a while, but then you see a well-guarded checkpoint with walls and a tower, and oh boy that’s a lot of stuff that could explode, I should blow it up, that’d take care of the walls and the towers and the guards and oh, right, stealth? Eh, whatever, I’ve got the drop on them, that’s enough.

The game’s more fun that noisy and mess-making way, anyway. The aiming isn’t quite accurate enough for long-distance sneaking and firing, enemies often very bullet sponge-y if they aren’t shot directly in the face, and even then they might need a couple more rounds in them depending on the effective range of the gun in question and how weak it is or isn’t. You yourself are a bit bullet sponge-y, though, even being able to recover from a near-death experience regularly so long as it doesn’t become actual death, so don’t think about complaining too much about how those armor-wearing dudes toting shotguns can get knocked down a couple of times before they stop getting back up even from your own close-range shotgun blasts to the chest.

As for story, well. There are some nifty things about how Black tells its tale: it’s a retelling, with Jack Kellar being interrogated by someone with authority to have him cuffed and alone in this dark room, and the slow realization that pretty much nothing went as Kellar imagined it was supposed to. He’s very obviously violent and not fond of taking orders, but it’s not positioned as if this is what makes him good at his job, at least not until the very end of the game. He’s being yelled at, being held here, because he ignores orders and does what he wants and, again, uses very big explosives and explosions to handle situations that probably do not need them. When it turns out the guy Kellar was chasing the entire game and thought was dead was actually still alive, however, that’s when the US government is finally like, “well, this is the kind of danger we need to unleash on the world, because the guy he’s chasing is worse.”

That end-game realization ends up meaning little, since there was no sequel to Black — EA and Criterion disagreed on the direction it should take, so it simply never happened, which, good on Criterion for not budging there, honestly, we’ve seen what happens to the work of studios that EA meddles too much in. And it undoes a bit of what I thought was happening that the game seemed to be suggesting, as well: Jack Kellar is retelling his story, but it’s simply unbelievable. The sheer volume of explosions, the fact he’s killing 150 soldiers per level with the help of just one to two useful but restrained allies on his team, that he single-handedly emptied out the final fortress of this guy that the CIA had hired to do dirty work for them in a way that would make even writers of summer movie blockbusters raise an eyebrow… it seemed a little too surreal. And the lighting in later levels gave everything kind of a dreamlike sheen on occasion, especially in some rather tense moments you really should not have survived at all. And yet, it turns out that this was all true, and this being held for questioning was more about seeing if he was the right kind of sociopath for the next job instead of the kind who would be dishonorably discharged.

Which does still work, if you want to read this from the perspective of the United States is willing to do some heinous things to keep their global hegemon where it is. And that’s not even a huge stretch, considering that the secondary objectives mentioned before are all things like finding, collecting, or destroying the plans and weapons of your enemies, yes, but also some unsavory evidence of things the US itself is doing and was going to be blackmailed for, and oh, again, the baddie of the game was employed by the CIA to do third-party terrorist work for the United States (but not explicitly in their name) in the global south before going freelance once again. Even this little morsel of implication of the United States as Not Necessarily a Moral Authority in a game from 2006, given, you know, everything that was going on there in that wildy racist, pro-war, America rah rah time period, is startling. At least, in a game published by a megacorp like EA, anyway.

Black’s level design, as said, isn’t top shelf. It’s certainly not up to par with the sound and visuals, both of which are astounding and impressive even now, nearly two decades later. Given it’ll take you about four hours to get through the eight levels on Normal, though, and the challenge is there if you want it for the higher difficulties, Black can be worth a playthrough now if you haven’t experienced it before. There might not be much to come back to other than the reminder that Criterion managed all of the impressive tech stuff 18 years ago if you’ve played before, but as far as a piece of history goes, one that pushed the hardware of its era to limits that showed they had plenty of life left in them and that it didn’t need to be the end of their gen just yet, well. Black does its job, for sure.

While it hasn’t seen a remaster or true re-release, it is available on the current-gen Xbox as part of EA’s portion of Game Pass, EA Play, and is available to purchase for $9.99 through the Xbox Marketplace, as well. On these modern Xbox iterations, the visuals are upscaled, and the audio absolutely still holds up, as well. Give it a spin if you’ve got the means to check it out and would like to cause an explosion or two.

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