Okay, so lets do things all scientific like! First off, the facts: Blacklight is an online free-to-play fps. The company behind the game is Perfect World Entertainment, who is also involved with Rusty Hearts (to be reviewed in the future), Star Trek Online, Perfect World International, and several other titles. The setting is dominantly futuristic urban and the gameplay caters towards the more teamwork centric, coordinated tactical style that the COD franchise is designed to work towards. The defining mechanic of the game is the HRV which allows the player to view all teammates and enemies on the map along with other key points. The game features an in-game shop stocked with rental items for weapon parts and armor, with the vast majority of the items obtainable with money gained in the game through matches as well as "zen" which is online currency that can be purchased from Perfect World Entertainment.
Next up is our analysis. We're skipping the hypothesis and observation steps because we don't really give two shits. Blacklight boils down to Modern Warfare with wallhacks and the word "futuristic" slapped on the description. The amount of teamwork exhibited by the players online is equivalent to that shown by most COD players. As far as tactics go, I let Hikachan fuck around on my account and buy random weapon parts and what he ended up with was a LMG with an extended barrel, light stock, and a precision scope. He then proceeded to throw logic a great big
and start up a TDM match with it. Now while we should provide for the fact that he didn't do very good at all in that match anyway, that is attributable to that fact that he doesn't play fps games on pc very often and doesn't change the fact that he didn't do TOO terribly bad.
On to the teamwork. *sigh*Most of the time no one bothers communicating with each other so there's no sharing of enemy positions between teammates and the game descends into a clusterfuck of people trying to solo the objectives on the map.
I will say one of the things I liked in this game was the HRV. Having the ability to see through walls and see enemy positions before making a decision was fun. The only problem was that by giving all the players the same ability it felt less like a novel mechanic and more like a legitimized wallhack.
In regards to the setting, I don't care for it. Partly because this brand of "futuristic" is kinda played out. When I look for a futuristic game, I'm hoping for lasers and such, not 5.56mm NATO and 7.62x39mm with a holographic reticule floating above the barrel of the gun. This is more of a matter of personal opinion. I grew up with Star Wars, Starlancer, and Mechwarrior as my definitions for futuristic, so not much we can do there.
The other mechanic I really enjoyed was the weapon customization. There's two things I'm really a sucker for: interesting game mechanics, and open customization. The weapon customization in Blacklight was plenty of fun in-and-of itself. Different combinations of parts yielded different weapon names and different stats as far as weight, accuracy, and magazine size. I had fun with the customization system and so did Hikachan.
One other thing I want to mention before I close things up here is the shop. Why mention that? Because that's where the game kind of falls apart for me. Items purchased in the shop can be purchased one of two ways, temporarily or permanently. How is this a problem? Well, purely in terms of mechanics it's not. In terms of the numbers, it's atrocious! One day part rentals are generally just a few hundred credits or less. You can make that in a match or two if you want. Longer rentals cost one to two thousand credits or so(never really checked, so I don't know). Purchasing permanently cost as low as 3000 credits, the highest I saw was 5075 credits, and these were for parts unlocked before level ten. While it stands to reason that I could just earn the credits, free users earn 100 to 150 credits a match(based on my own observations, if I ever earned more, I wasn't paying attention). This made setting up a specific loadout obnoxiously difficult for anyone not willing to shell out money for ZEN, which could be used to purchase permanent items not only ridiculously cheap, but also early. This puts free users at a bit of a disadvantage when going up against paying players where the higher stats, while not a significant gamebreaker, definitely make a difference.
Now comes everyone's favorite part, the conclusion! Also known as the tl;dr paragraph. I personally didn't like it. It's not a bad game, the mechanics work well and the visuals are very high quality, but the setting doesn't quite do it for me. I would have liked a little more background into the whole idea of why we were fighting in the first place(if there was context given, I missed it somewhere). I'm pretty sure the folks who enjoyed Call of Duty games or Battlefield might enjoy this game, but for me it was just another run-of-the-mill shooter. It's a nice distraction, but it ultimately left me wanting more from it, and the slightly pay to win feel turned me away from the game in the end.
So since I'm so new here, I'm gonna let you folks know what you can expect from me in the near future. Mechwarrior Online is going to be out this summer as well as Phantasy Star Online 2, and I'm currently waiting for Firefall to leave closed beta(or be accepted into the closed beta, might be a while). I'll likely review each of these ASAP when each one becomes available to me. In the meantime I'll probably do a quick review for Rusty Hearts even though it's been out for a while. In the meantime this is the Hindenburg, signing off for the very first time!
One other thing I want to mention before I close things up here is the shop. Why mention that? Because that's where the game kind of falls apart for me. Items purchased in the shop can be purchased one of two ways, temporarily or permanently. How is this a problem? Well, purely in terms of mechanics it's not. In terms of the numbers, it's atrocious! One day part rentals are generally just a few hundred credits or less. You can make that in a match or two if you want. Longer rentals cost one to two thousand credits or so(never really checked, so I don't know). Purchasing permanently cost as low as 3000 credits, the highest I saw was 5075 credits, and these were for parts unlocked before level ten. While it stands to reason that I could just earn the credits, free users earn 100 to 150 credits a match(based on my own observations, if I ever earned more, I wasn't paying attention). This made setting up a specific loadout obnoxiously difficult for anyone not willing to shell out money for ZEN, which could be used to purchase permanent items not only ridiculously cheap, but also early. This puts free users at a bit of a disadvantage when going up against paying players where the higher stats, while not a significant gamebreaker, definitely make a difference.
Now comes everyone's favorite part, the conclusion! Also known as the tl;dr paragraph. I personally didn't like it. It's not a bad game, the mechanics work well and the visuals are very high quality, but the setting doesn't quite do it for me. I would have liked a little more background into the whole idea of why we were fighting in the first place(if there was context given, I missed it somewhere). I'm pretty sure the folks who enjoyed Call of Duty games or Battlefield might enjoy this game, but for me it was just another run-of-the-mill shooter. It's a nice distraction, but it ultimately left me wanting more from it, and the slightly pay to win feel turned me away from the game in the end.
So since I'm so new here, I'm gonna let you folks know what you can expect from me in the near future. Mechwarrior Online is going to be out this summer as well as Phantasy Star Online 2, and I'm currently waiting for Firefall to leave closed beta(or be accepted into the closed beta, might be a while). I'll likely review each of these ASAP when each one becomes available to me. In the meantime I'll probably do a quick review for Rusty Hearts even though it's been out for a while. In the meantime this is the Hindenburg, signing off for the very first time!
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