I really enjoyed Black on PS2, and here's my review from back in the day, I gave it four out of five stars...
With the awesome Burnout 3: Takedown developers Criterion had shown what kind of performance the then elderly PlayStation 2 was capable of when manipulated by masters. At the start of 2006 with the next generation of consoles already on the shelves (or at least, the Xbox 360) Criterion did it again – releasing Black, a game with next-gen looks that ran on a six-year-old console.
Black does for first-person shooters exactly what Burnout did for driving games: it turns the intensity up to eleven. Think of the most ‘pumped up’ action movie shoot-outs – the attack on the jungle camp in Predator, Die Hard’s ‘shoot the glass’, the lobby scene in The Matrix – and you’ll get an idea of what Black is striving for. I’ve heard it described as ‘gun porn’ and that’s a difficult term to improve on. It doesn’t feature gratuitous blood or gore, but it does boast a huge body count (over a hundred on most missions) and what’s more, almost everything in the game’s sprawling environments seems designed to explode, shatter, or shred when subjected to your hailstorm of bullets. After you’ve finished with them, the various Eastern European locales in which Black takes place resemble smoking, ruined visions of the apocalypse.
There are, however, a few quibbles: save-game checkpoints are placed relatively far apart and it gets irritating when you have to play the same stretch over and over (Black does become quite challenging toward the end); the video cut-scenes between levels are pretty uninspired, and there’s no multi-player whatsoever. Black is an entertaining game while it lasts, though, and provides a visceral rush that few first-person shooters can match.
Also on the Xbox. Black never received a sequel although the disappointing Bodycount was billed as a spiritual successor.
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