“Drop everything that moves” – Black

For all of Medal of Honor’s massive success for a couple of years, and the phenomenon of Halo, in early 2006 we still hadn’t quite reached peak First Person Shooter. That meant a better space for alternative takes on the genre to get mainstream attention. Couple that with the same end-of-the-generation trend for serious and impressive redefinitions that brought us Shadow of the Colossus, and the stage was set for a newcomer to do something a bit different with the military shooter.

The genre newcomer behind Black was Criterion Games, creators of the Burnout series. They were part of a concentration of British games companies in Guildford, previously home to Bullfrog, who like Criterion had been bought out by EA. For Black, a tale of “overt not covert” secret military black ops missions, Criterion set out to capture the feeling of their favourite film action sequences, and to address the basics of shooting: “Shooting guns in real life is a lot of fun; we wanted to replicate that”.

The breakthrough calling cards of Medal of Honor: Frontline and Medal of Honor: Rising Sun were their recreations of the Normandy landings and Pearl Harbor attacks, triumphs of spectacle. Those had history and elaborate settings on their side alongside their explosions to help evoke feelings. Black almost goes out of its way to avoid anything so resonant, yet achieves a similar level of effect through not much more than jaw-dropping cacophony. 

It is the sound, weapons as voices in a harsh metallic choir, which leads the sensual assault, demanding to be played loud. It extends further into the philosophy of Black though. The action and the quick health packs that enemies drop is set up to promote constant movement and attack. The whole picture refocuses and blurs in front of you as you reload, heightening the senses and focus on the gun further. There is indeed a wow and sense of power in firing, particularly when it comes to the shotguns. Bullet-holes and destruction apply to just about everything you can see. It’s not quite the same as the sprawling, explosive crash scenes in Burnout Revenge, but there is an obvious succession there in the balletic action. So too the way your ammo counter is shown on screen as a row of bullets which peel off as you fire them feels a particularly Burnout touch.

Where Burnout operated in a world that looked like ours but with a curious absence of humanity, Black isn’t so bold as to be a world of guns and no people or to have you just shooting scenery. You instead blast your way through a familiarly vague terrorist group across a swathe of Eastern Europe. The story of exactly what you’re doing and why is vague and elliptical, played out in flashbacks in between taut cutscenes of your main character being interrogated over his actions by his American superiors. These are shot in close-up, grainy, blurred and disorienting. The story is visibly an afterthought, but its approach is a smart one.

It doesn’t hold back much. The lead is presented with evidence of having tortured a suspect and doesn’t even attempt to deny it. The game concludes with the whole thing having been revealed as a series of deceptions and blackmails to enable the CIA to avoid democratic scrutiny when it came to going after one of their own turned rogue. I’m not exaggerating or reading much to get there: you’re told “you’ve untied our hands” and Congress is specifically mentioned. It’s very possible that extraordinary rendition (a hot topic which the UK’s parliament was just about to discuss our complicity in at the time) was on Criterion’s minds.

The blackmail and deception bind work to provide some moral wriggle room, but ultimately you are still playing a torturer and racking up thousands of extrajudicial killings. There is an inherent sense of grubbiness, but it’s hard to come away with the idea that Criterion intended to suggest unaccountable secret military is a good thing (with the same note as Conflict: Vietnam that condemning the USA always comes so much easier to the British than looking at ourselves). Not a good thing; merely a convenient thing for giving you a chance to be let loose with guns! Which, again, is an easier prospect to reckon with from a country that doesn’t have the same horrendous institutionalised gun culture as America. And once again, the low bar of games, in this case offered by preposterous military shooters and the glorification put out under the name of Tom Clancy, means even the awkward stance of Black is as much of an improvement as its kinetic destructive action.

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Top of the charts for week ending 25 February 2006:

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