I finished the campaign for Blacksite: Area 51 last week and spent a little time with the multiplayer. I had fun playing the campaign. It was not the best first person shooter I’ve played by any means, but it was fun. The environments were mostly destructible which leads to some fun tactics like shooting at walls that enemies are hiding behind until they are destroyed and the enemies has to run for new cover. The campaign is not very long and the plot is kind of cheesy, but the developers got the amount of enemies perfect. There were not so many coming at me that I could not keep up and died a lot, but there were enough that I never got bored or let me guard down while running around. Plus, they give you plenty of ammo for the appropriate weapon for the types of enemies in the area. Towards the end of the game there was plenty of ammo for the plasma rifle which is a blast to use. You can control when the plasma explodes so you can shoot it just past the corner of a building or just over a short wall where enemies are hiding, and then blow it up and kill the enemies from behind. Also, the driving levels were not to bad because the AI teammates actually shoot the most appropriate enemies instead of randomly shooting at whoever happens to be closest. The squad controls in the game are pretty simple. Basically you just point where you want your squad to be and hit the Right Bumper. If there is something there, like a door, they will interact with it, but otherwise they just go to that spot. They also added what they call squad moral. Basically, the better you play the better your teammates play too. If you take a lot of damage and have to hide to heal then your teammates moral goes low and they hide a lot more than shoot, but if you get a lot of kills your teammates will get more aggressive and start charging enemies. Overall it was a decent campaign with a fair number of achievements to be picked up. Nothing off the charts great, but still fun none the less.

After completing the campaign I spent a little time with the multiplayer. There were the normal deathmatch, team deathmatch, and capture the flag game types. In addition to these there is one called Abduction that is essentially the same as Zombies from Halo 3. One person starts on their own team with everyone against them and as they kill people they join their team. The one game play mechanic that did not have much effect in the campaign but made a huge difference in the multiplayer was that the larger the weapon you’re carrying the slower you move. So, with the pistol out you’re practically running, but with the rocket launcher you’re at a crawl. It adds a nice balance because there are plenty of every weapon on the map so at first people would try to grab rockets, but I was picking them off pretty easily with the assault rifle and the sniper because I could move so much faster. Like the campaign the multiplayer was fun, but nothing special. After trying a few rounds of each game type I ended up giving up on it because there were so few people playing it took 3 or 4 minutes just to get 4 people in a room so we could start matches. It seemed like most of the people player were just trying to get the achievements for playing each game type and getting 100 kills with each weapons. Because of this hardly anyone was playing CTF, but there were still enough for a couple matches.