Black One Blood Brothers (PC) - Preview

Let’s play the usual game of me talking about a tactical shooter/military sim, while also notably being quite vocal on the after-action reports of real-world missions. If we’re one thing as humans, we’re contradictions. Something that sounds like a contradiction is a highly detailed real-time tactical military sim, akin to SWAT 4 or Ready or Not, but featuring a tactical command menu like a 3D Door Kickers and it is made by one French bloke. My point is, how can it be solo developed and be such a detailed military sim/tactical shooter? Historically the most difficult genre to get right.

Designed from the ground up as the wet dream of a special operations nerd, a lot of Black One Blood Brothers has roughness built in, and I’m not talking about a podcaster’s idea of an “alpha male.” Still in early access 2 years into development, there are bugs, there are graphical glitches, and there are bits that feel somewhat like a single person made it. Then you get into the squad editor, you see the loadout customization, you play around with the customization options, and eventually, you stumble upon the command menu. With the right missions, with the right circumstances, it is easy to get lost in the world.

With 20 missions in the official “campaign,” Steam Workshop support, a mission editor, a campaign editor, and a “Mission” option that is effectively a quick-play option, there is quite a lot going on even in early access. Without wanting to sound like I am coating Black One Blood Brothers in my love of tactical shooters, the tutorial is currently a bit crap. It is serviceable and does a job, but I don’t think it does a great job for exactly what Black One Blood Brothers is. At the time of writing, the command menu isn’t even mentioned and it is easily the most important piece to the “USP” puzzle here.

A bit clunky, not very pretty, and of course takes another learning curve of somewhat awkward keyboard commands, Black One Blood Brothers isn’t anywhere near perfect. From the tutorial bugging out to the AI being a bit too artificial to be called intelligent, there are places to be improved on, and some greatly so. With base command set out of South Africa or roundabout there, your group of operators known as “Black One” are set to take on a new threat called “New World,” as shown in the campaign “Serpent’s Whisper.” With your designated group of operators, broken down into defaults, saved, and downloaded squads of 1-10.

With a campaign that can either be played in two parts or as one big piece, there is a vague story being told of interconnected terror cells, their plans, and the group’s overall intentions. In “Serpent’s Whisper” you have a terror cell that is funded by some Eastern countries to carry out attacks in the US, France, India, Japan, and “England.” I mean, fair enough. The last time religious extremists attempted to bomb an airport in Scotland, it was a baggage handler who kicked (in the groin) a burning man into submission (later death) and said after, “Come to Glasgow. Glasgow doesn’t accept this […] this is Glasgow; we’ll set about you.”

The “Black One,” the unit formed to fight in the neverending “war on terror,” consists of whoever you want (as long as you want men) with just about any piece of equipment you could imagine from a generalized point of view. Being a spec-ops unit, you can select any weapon and customize it however you want. This is where you start seeing how ridiculous it is to say Black One Blood Brothers is developed by one person. From barrel length depending on the gun, the barrel shrouding/foregrip, the stock, and even the optic down to what is in the sight.

Want to run an ACOG with only a little dot instead of the standard sight? So be it. “Better” still, you have the ability to camouflage the gun, right down to the individual parts… for every member of the squad. Trouble remembering the names and four voices to tell which operator has which tools? You can dress up your army men however you want, and thanks to the Steam Workshop, you can slap a couple individual patches on each of them too. Not only that, there is a height option and short guys can’t see through high windows up-close.

From running what is basically a HK416 or an M4 with a bi-pod for a Designated Marksman (DMR), to building up your own Accuracy International Arctic Warfare Magnum to match your Ghillie suit. That reminds me, you can swap in and out of each operator like it was GTA V in missions in real-time. So you might have a support team providing overwatch on the compound as the assault team goes in; two snipers, two providing direct cover/DMR roles, and a third lugging around a LSW for rear support. Black One Blood Brothers is a game of sandboxes which you can create or download. Including Neptune Spear.

Once you’ve selected which level you are assaulting, doing reconnaissance on, extracting an HVT, saving hostages, eliminating targets, and the whole assortment of things these DEVGRU/SAS type units do. You are given an overview of the map that looks like a white textured Lidar look, showing a very rough geometric version of the map. For example, the trees in the Klettgau Forest for “Green Ghost” are just large cones that are difficult for Black One Blood Brothers to recognize as something a bit skinnier.

Once you’ve decided where the team inserts, you decide where everyone extracts from. Realistically, you can place anyone at any one of the insertion points, but there is only one extraction. From there it is a simple little cutscene that again shows the roughness of solo development, but it gets the awesome C130 deployment thing down. Sometimes you’ll even get fast roping, scuba, and HALO/HAHO jumping. It is all to show how amazing you are and you totally have a massive one under all that armor.

The bit beyond that is where it gets a bit more “complex,” especially if you know what you are doing and you don’t get frustrated by the speed of the camera in the command map menu. Once you’ve been deployed into the area, that is it, you are on your own with your team and you are given carte blanche to complete the mission objectives however you please. Well, at least for the campaign, mostly.

In the Mission option, which again is a quick play function, you are given a number of gameplay modes to choose from. This can be a strict extraction, a spec-ops (do as you please on the objectives you select), and even “War” which is a capture point style thing from my understanding. While 99% of these tactical shooters focus on online play, it is odd that Black One Blood Brothers is an entirely single-player experience. This makes modes like that a little bit odd.

Nonetheless, once you’ve deployed on missions and the teams (assault and R&S) are both in place, you can hit Caps Lock and bring up that lovely Lidar map again. This time it’s in full 3D with a flying camera and the ability to set up actions on commands, sort of. A bit like the aforementioned Door Kickers, but in 3D and a touch more difficult to fully grasp intuitively. Every time you enter that mode the world is paused, but you can unpause it at any time to watch as the teams mark and engage targets.

Once you can understand the tools at hand, it becomes quite a complex way of setting up a Reconnaissance and Surveillance (R&S) team while the direct action team get into position to start kicking doors. In fact, at any point, you can break teams up and swap them around to intermingle with each other for any number of tasks, as long as you have the right equipment. That’s where I think I actually have an “issue” with Black One Blood Brothers. As the teams can be so heavily customized between missions and modes, it is easy to forget which members have what tools.

Worse still, on one of my PCs a bug meant all custom names wouldn’t stick. The kit is the same for saved squads, but the names reset, so if I’ve remembered my explosives/electronics expert and M203-wielding guy is called “Sparky,” I’ve no idea where Sparky is when his default name is Kevin or something. I know who Vladimir and Dylan are, as I’ve called them, “Mad Vlad” and “Pinpoint” because those two are easier to remember; they are the ones cosplaying as bushes.

Beyond the names above heads in neon colors, I’ve no idea which bloke kitted to the gills and covered in mossy oak is the one that has the lock picking kit and which has the dynamic hammer. The UI should help, but if I’m honest (when aren’t I?), the small icons and lack of UI scaling makes it difficult to discern who has what. The same can be said of the command-battle map thing. The vague small symbols mean something to someone, but to someone new to it, who is an old man trapped in a decrepit younger man’s body, it isn’t exactly intuitive.

At least in the Battle Plan map, you can hover over icons, though that still doesn’t mean the overall experience is fluid and easy to memorize. However, when you get to grips with the team, the the dynamics of breaching with each little group or pairings you’ve created, it works so well. Not in the Ready or Not or SWAT 4 style of fluid. The university level “Ivory Freedom” (cue the next controversy) you have a whole set of exterior stairs the AI can’t walk up alone. This is where being able to command everyone and transmogrify into everyone, even captured hostages and otherwise, is useful.

Nonetheless, Black One Blood Brothers works in the sense that it offers all of these tools, this freedom to do anything within the perimeters of the operation, and does so with ambition. It is a Ghost Recon without the “No, you can’t do that” of a Triple-A studio. It is a SOCOM that has been updated to modern stylings, but hasn’t lost the sense of trying something new or different with its mechanics. At this stage it is rough, and you can’t deny that.

One thing a lot of people will say about Black One Blood Brothers is that it graphically looks a bit PS3-era. More so in the textures than the colors, but you can see where some textures are breaking to repeat, you can tell some sections are a bit more low resolution, and generally you can feel the datedness of the graphics from your first to your last mission. If you want to be superficial about it, yeah it doesn’t look great, but when you get a game that can be a bit unique and maybe can’t run ultra-polished 4K, super sexy textures, then yeah, I don’t really care.

Performance is where I care, though, and it’s okay-ish. I’ve seen dips into the 40s (mostly modded maps), I’ve seen menus drop to 17 frames per second here or there for a second, and I’ve seen it mostly run at a decent 60. The only thing I’ve turned off is motion blur because I’ve got a couple of brain cells still copulating. Otherwise, playing with everything at the highest available settings, the frame rate is mostly stable, occasional single-frame dips here or there, and if you’re using DLSS you might see some blurriness on the far side of the map or room.

On my end, there is more to say about bugs than there is about the frame rate. From sight controls in the tutorial just not working as smoothly, operators glitching out of the killhouse if the formation is too wide, the aforementioned names, AI not reacting to friends being killed in front of or next to them, and other minor things here or there. I’ve not shied away from the rough state of Black One Blood Brothers, it is there from the very start.

Difficulty isn’t really there yet either, (especially the lower difficulties). As I say, the AI needs a good bit of work. From just standing there as their counterparts get shot in the head, lights or lasers not really affecting them, or other things like sound not always triggering them to move out of position. Until you are in an active gunfight, AI mostly stands still for you. Some maps they’ll patrol, some elements will break formation to explore what’s going on, but we’re not talking out-and-out intelligence from the AI. I’m not looking for Ready or Not’s aim-bot 3000s, but something just a little more perceptive would be nice.

What Black One Blood Brothers offers currently in its early access state around the 1.51 update, what it shows in terms of potential, I’m excited by it and eager to play more. With a solid map-creating/modding community, I could see Black One Blood Brothers being a replacement for my daily Door Kickers 2 exploits, eventually. Some of those maps are actually quite good and expansive, if a little threadbare when it comes to their actual variety. Maps are made up of prefabricated buildings that are serviceable, which isn’t saying much.

In fact, the map creation tool is a little obtuse if I do say so. Working in a 3D environment, I can’t blame it or its creator for its overall complexities. That said, without a tutorial or general tools to really give it much of a chance to learn the basics, I’m afraid it is difficult to give an opinion on it as a whole. Playing on the other end of the maps created by the community via the Steam Workshop, like all crowd-sourced extra material, it is sometimes content of good quality and sometimes on par with the toxic sewer for so-called “memes” that we call the Internet.

Maybe not the Door Kickers 2 levels with half a billion suicide bombers killing the frame rate before killing you, but similar effort. Some are made from a desire to expand and create something worth playing, some feel more like testing grounds or maps for games made in the early 2000s. To some people, the latter would be on par with the graphical fidelity, but I personally think of that as a little harsh to the graphics. Not the maps, though, they need work.

Ultimately, Black One Blood Brothers is the shot in the arm that the indie sphere needs to make a decent modern Ghost Recon game that isn’t puppeting the corpse of Tom Clancy. Work needs to be done on some features, some elements could be improved, weapon sway when aiming could be less vomit-inducing, and AI could be improved on by not being as dense as a reality TV star, but the groundwork is there. Everything thus far is serviceable or workable, and I can say in the space of a week I got more than 30 hours with Black One Blood Brothers.