Blacklight: Tango Down | Review (PC/PS3/Xbox 360)

Blacklight: Tango Down Review.

Blacklight: Tango Down is a downloadable FPS brought to you by Zombie Studios and Ignition Entertainment. It’s an online-only multiplayer FPS which can be downloaded from Xbox Live, PSN and Steam/GFWL and will only cost you $15 or £10 to play. Is Blacklight: Tango Down possibly the steal of the century or is there some sort of catch?

The first person shooter genre is one of the most flooded in the entire videogame industry and arguably one of the most successful. Big hitters of the genre spend millions on marketing their shooters in order to reach the biggest crowd possible be it Activision with Call of Duty or EA with Battlefield and Medal of Honour. So in an arena with possibly the two biggest third party publishers in gaming attempting to beat the shit out of each other – can a small downloadable game like Blacklight: Tango Down hold its own or does it even compare?

When people look at a game like Blacklight: Tango Down, they might be right to feel a bit sceptical. The game doesn’t look like the other XBLA or PSN games which you would find for the same price. The game runs at a smooth 60 frames per second and was built using the Unreal Engine 3, the same tech behind games such as Gears of War, Batman: Arkham Asylum and the upcoming Bullet Storm. If you were to see the game for the first time and judge it only by its looks then you would be forgiven for thinking that Blacklight: Tango Down is a full-price game. To then be told that the game will in fact only cost you $15 or £10 you’d also be forgiven for asking questions like ‘Why is it so cheap?’ or ‘Surely the game play must be horrible?’ and you might be surprised to hear that Blacklight: Tango Down is actually a very enjoyable and good looking FPS – even better when you consider how much you paid for it.

One of the things which has popularised the FPS is the online multiplayer component. Substance and story has given away a bit to the introduction of trash-talk and tea-bagging. FPS Multiplayer has become such an integral part of the package some people will pay full price for a game like Battlefield Bad Company 2 or Modern Warfare 2 and hardly ever touch the campaign. The fact that Modern Warfare 2’s campaign can be completed in an afternoon could yet it has one of the most in-depth multiplayer experiences available is a testament to how important multiplayer has become in this current generation of games. What a game like BLTD does is allow you to just purchase the part which you care about – which to most people is the multiplayer for a cheaper price rather than spending extra money on features which neither you (or in some cases even the Developers) couldn’t give a flying toss about.

If you’ve ever played Call of Duty then Blacklight: Tango Down will feel very familiar to you. It’s more about small skirmishes with a handful of players on each team rather than being more large-scale like Battlefield. You’ll pick a load-out, run around the map, gun a few players down, get gunned down yourself and then repeat. It’s fairly familiar FPS fare but there are a few little unique touches which help to set Blacklight: Tango Down apart and give it a much needed identity in the crowded shooter market. The game has a very futuristic look about it. Anybody who’s ever played Deus Ex will get what I’m talking about. The game is centred on a war between two factions:  Blacklight and The Order. The game also has a very prominent cyber warfare type theme. When you run around you can see the bopping of your visor with all the information on the HUD following its curve Metroid Prime style. The visor also has a special mode which allows you to temporarily see through walls with enemies, ammo dumps and health dumps highlighted for you. This mode can only be used for a limited time before it recharges you can’t fire whilst it is active. This adds a strategic element and gives you a clue as to where the action is but whilst I was running and gunning around the fact that I even had the ability to do such a thing completely escaped me. One really nice touch which I liked was the fact that instead of having a smoke grenade, you have a grenade which will interfere with your visor so instead of seeing a cloud of smoke, you see a giant lump of asian-porno style pixilation on the screen and your visor can even get the blue screen of death. I think little touches like that give Blacklight: Tango Down just enough of an identity to stand out whilst the game play stays with the tried and true.

No multiplayer shooter would be complete without some sort of gigantic list of unlocks to grind for and Blacklight: Tango Down is absolutely no exception. Levelling up your rank allows you to unlock different parts with which to customise your weapon of choice. The game boasts hundreds of different weapon possibilities by combining different components and whilst I haven’t done the math I can at least confirm that the game features an absolute ton of unlockable Scopes, magazines, stocks and barrels. What’s even crazier is the amount of Tags which you can decorate your guns with. Tags for your guns affect your stats in certain ways with some boosting damage or health and can be used in conjunction with all the other weapon parts which gives the gamer even more ways to personalise their weaponry. There is also a crap-load of tags which you can unlock – literally hundreds.

Blacklight: Tango Down sticks to what everybody currently likes in a multiplayer FPS whilst having enough quirks of its own to help it stand on its own against its boxed and full priced rivals. Even with the fun game play and incredibly robust and in-depth unlock system its biggest selling point will always be its price. What I would say is that although it’s a $15/£10 game, it is more robust and offers more content than the multiplayer modes on some full price games and looks as good as a full price game to boot. If what you want is a fun multiplayer FPS without having to pay for a 5 hour campaign costing you another $45 then look no further.