Released as the fourth game in the Area 51 series, Blacksite is a squad based first person shooter for the Xbox 360, Playstation 3, and PC developed by Midway Studios Austin. For those unfamiliar with the series, Area 51 was originally released in arcades in 1995 by Atari Games. The first two games in the series were light gun games, which would later be ported to the Playstation and Satun. The franchise would later receive a reboot in 2005, courtesy of Midway, on the PS2 and Xbox in the form of a first person shooter.



Blacksite is the story of Captain Aeran Pierce and his Delta Force Echo Squad, the game picks up with the squad stationed in Iraq during the Iraq War. In the begining, the squad of Aeran, Scott Sommers, Cody Grayson, and Mitchell Ambrose are ordered to search an Iraqi bunker for weapons of mass destruction. On their way to the bunker, they are inoculated by Doctor Noa Wise, who also acts as a translator for the group, and they begin their decent into the bunker. After fighting through the Iraqi military, the group discovers no WMD, but instead comes across some sort of alien device, the device is mistakenly activated by Sommers, the causes the squad to be attacked by alien creatures, known as Xeno, and the squad that entered with five people in two now leave with only four. Three years pass, and Pierce's squad is asked to look into a heavily armed militia that has taken control of the small Nevada town of Rachel. Pierce and his squad head out, but little do they know that there is a lot more to this militia than the military is letting on.

Blacksite is a fairly straight forward game, which is fairly standard for the genre, the controls are similar to those of most first person shooters, with the right and left triggers being your fire button and zoom button respectively, left bumper uses grenades, right bumper allows you to command your squad mates, these commands can be used to issue a focus fire order on an enemy (which has all your squad mates focus on a single target) or have your squad mates enter vehicles or use turrets, the face buttons handle the rest of the commands, with X reloading, B for Melee, Y to switch weapons, and A being your confirmation button. The game is also fairly linear, leaving some limited exploring available in certain area for the collection of Dossiers, the game is also fairly impressive on the graphical front, using a modified version of Epic's Unreal III engine. One of my favorite use of the visuals in the game is from the third area, when you first get to Rachel, it's raining and you can actually see little droplets of water hitting your character's gun and the visuals for the wet ground are also pretty impressive for a game that's nearly two years old, it's no Gears of War 2, but it's certainly no slouch with its visuals. As far as sound goes, I honestly didn't pay too much attention to the music, but none of it really stood out or seemed very memorable, this isn't unusual for an FPS though, the voice work for the game was nothing special, I personally felt that by the end of the game, characters like Grayson really got annoying and I was tired of hearing them. As for game modes, the game features a campaign, which clocks in at about six hours and has three available difficulties, then there are your online modes which feature your standard death match and capture the flag, but also have Abduction, which is similar to the versus mode from Left 4 Dead, in this mode, one play begins as a Reborn and the rest of the characters are humans, as the humans die they respawn as Reborn and the matches plays out like this until there are no human players left, it's an interesting mode but since the game's online community is basically dead at this point, it's nearly impossible to find anyone playing anything other than death match.

Blacksite is a decent game, the game's story enough to keep a going through the game until the end but it's nothing standout, and the game didn't seem to receive the most care with it's audio either, my only other gripes with the game is the limited selection of available weapons, with only six available, and that fact that even if your character is climbing a rope or ladder, they still have their gun drawn (that last thing is really nitpicky, but that's just how I am). Now, before I get down to my verdict, let's talk about why this wasn't the commercial success that Midway was likely hoping for, this is a simple case of a bad release window, the game was released in November 2007 and as we all know the holidays are always jam packed with game releases, and seeing that is was released around the same time as games such as Halo 3, Guitar Hero III, Call of Duty 4, Assassin's Creed, and Crysis, it's not hard to see why the game was overlooked.

My verdict on this one is to give it a shot, it's mearly an average game that suffered due to a bad release window. The game would make for a good rental since the campaign is so short and there really isn't an online community left and sadly I can't recommend buying this one, unless you're a collector or you can pick it up for less that $20 USD, which at the time this was written as sealed copy was averaging $20-$30 USD on the two consoles.

Score - 6 / 10

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