BlackSite: Area 51

Sometimes you need something average just to be able to appreciate the extraordinary when you see it. BlackSite: Area 51 helps you with just those kind of moments by offering an almost painfully average arcadey FPS experience with a nice shiny coat of Unreal Engine 3 paint.

The action is enjoyable enough, so you can expect a few cheap thrills when you load it up. The plot, on the other hand, is so shockingly predictable that you’ll be able to guess exactly how it ends by the time you finish the first mission. As an Army Delta Force captain, you lead a squad of three soldiers first through Iraq on an ill-fated hunt for WMDs, and then to quell a mysterious disturbance in the town of Rachel, Nevada. Over the course of the six chapters, totaling eight to 10 hours of gameplay, you battle mutated soldiers called Reborn, crawling bombs, and giant alien worms fresh out of Tremors; race around in Humvees; and man helicopter turrets until you reach the inevitable boss battles with helpfully highlighted weak points. Even the final boss totally phones his performance in, not even bothering to move a few feet to shoot you when you hide behind a narrow pillar to heal.

Using the one-button squad command system to order your troops around and keep their morale (and thus their combat effectiveness) high can be useful, but it’ll feel like a chore after a while, especially since even at their best you can’t count on your squad to cover your back. Luckily, squad management is entirely optional except when you have to open certain doors.

Some shooter veterans will find BlackSite too easy because it uses the Call of Duty-style recharging health in lieu of health power-ups, and there is more assault-rifle ammo scattered around the levels than you’d find at Charlton Heston’s bunker (and you just know he has one). However, certain parts involving homing projectiles can be frustratingly difficult, and occasional bugs like frame-rate dips and getting stuck on level geometry make the going a little less easy.

Multiplayer includes an Abduction Mode where Reborn players hunt humans, but it boils down to a deathmatch with a different scoring system. Nothing to see here, move along…

The one aspect of BlackSite that stands out from the crowd is its not-so-subtle political commentary — for example, every mission is titled with a Bush-ism, like “Stay the Course,” “Mission Accomplished,” and “Regime Change,” and the game leaves nothing to the imagination regarding its designers’ political viewpoints. Whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing is up to you, but we just wish they’d woven it in a little better — no one likes being preached at when they’re trying to kill alien scum.