The year was 2006, the console was the PS2, and the developer was Criterion Games. The perfect storm of developer, console, and year following half a decade of car-crashing success. Better still, the studio was still backed by EA, meaning the studio was given the go-ahead to practically do as it pleased because that Burnout thing worked out so well. Designed mostly by Craig Sullivan with story from Stuart Black (with Alex Ward credited as creator), Black stands out today as a lone PS2 title that may sit at the bottom of a second-hand shops’ bargain bins for a console that’s been out of production for a decade now.

However, still nearly two decades after its release and development, there are fans who cling to the gameplay of the title as they suffer unsatisfying pew-pew weapons. Despite being developed in a country where it is difficult to get anything above a Glock, Black took the sound of gunpowder igniting, the flash of a muzzle, the dust settling, and every other bit of detritus in an empty room, and threw it about like your guts on a roller coaster. Guns sound like bombs falling, explosions sound like the sun finally taking us all, and every room you fire a gun in wants to give you asthma.

Yet for all the hype and praise I can lump onto the gameplay, the campaign — though fairly mature for its purpose — fails to really do anything worthwhile. In fact, you could remove it entirely and intersplice segments from Barney the Dinosaur and it would make about as much sense. Moreover, Black’s 6-hour runtime and no multiplayer in the days of Halo and 21 months before COD: 4 Modern Warfare, that led to some reviewers decrying foul. Though as we saw with Spec Ops: the Line, multiplayer isn’t always a great idea, and sometimes brevity is for the best.

Playing as Sergeant First Class Jack Kellar, played by Marty Papazian, the leader of a CIA Black Ops unit. Told in live-action depictions of Tom Clancy’s “reading” material, Kellar is telling the story of the days prior throughout the cutscenes, explaining his actions as he was sent to Russia to deal with a terrorist group known as “Seventh Wave.” The trouble is, despite being quite mature about its storytelling, nothing feels cohesive between the gameplay and the character we’re supposedly embodying. The voice in the cutscene feels like a different person to the one firing very loud and exciting guns.

There is no connection, no energy, no passion to marry the two into this cohesive unit to make the story feel connected entirely to the gameplay. Yet still, the story of Jack Bauer’s Black Ops cousin still works for the time – somewhere between the war on terror and the war against Russia 16 years following the collapse of the Soviet Union. I can cut myself off here and simply say that the story is its own thing, and is very 2006 in that it doesn’t want to do what Modern Warfare would do several months later. However, that’s never been the reason anyone has said they enjoy Black.

The simple reason everyone enjoys Black is that its guns feel heavy, loud, and as if you’ve just put enough metal in someone to give their kids lead poisoning. It is wonderful! Though looking back at those two lines, I’m sure I’m now on some sort of questionable list for saying those things back-to-back. However, it is true: The starting weapon, which is a blend of the Beretta 92FS (Lt. John McClane’s weapon) and Desert Eagle, is staggeringly loud and obscene. Though if you want obscene, as with all games of the 2000s, there is a Franchi SPAS-12, which looks and sounds like a multi-car pile-up on the Autobahn.

More importantly, the environment actually reacts. Fire that SPAS-12 and there is enough dust and sparks you’ll think a nuke dropped, while enemies reacting to being shot look like they’re filming something for the Tiks and the Toks. Sorry, that’s my old man attitude coming in again. The point I’m trying to make is that if you miss someone, which you will because the controls are old and freaky to modern shooters, you need to wait 3-12 business days before you see the person again. We’re talking about a PS2 game here, while I’m typing this up on a computer that’s a billion times more powerful yet has never seen such action.

Ultimately, Black makes me angry. Black makes me angry because modern shooters can’t or won’t replicate just how destructive and powerful guns actually are. With almost two full decades between release and this review, I’m left angry that out of the seventeen quintillion games released, 40% of which are first-person shooters, absolutely nothing has replicated Black even half as much as the entire industry should be doing. I want to be deafened by a shotgun and to see a man’s face melt like he looked into the center of reactor number 4 of the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant.

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Black

8.5

Score

8.5/10

Pros

• Guns go boom!
• A real sense of focus when it comes to gameplay.
• The world reacts to me firing a gun.

Cons

• Clearly Jack Kellar's right-handed, his left-handed throw is terrible.
• The story is entirely disconnected from the gameplay.