Black (video game)



Black is a First-Person Shooter released on the Playstation 2 and Xbox in 2006. It was made by Criterion Games, who also developed the Burnout series. Black follows the story of Sergeant First Class Jack Keller, an black ops soldier being interrogated about a terrorist organization known as 'Seventh Wave'. The in-game missions begin four days before the interrogation and soon revolve around Jack searching for William Lenox, the new leader of the Seventh Wave, across a variety of locations in Chechnya.

Black received good to lukewarm reviews for its explosive action, detailed guns and impressive technology, even picking up awards for its sound design. However, there was no multiplayer and only a short singleplayer campaign, leaving many people to feel that there was little content to the game.

Received a Spiritual Sequel in the form of Bodycount.


 * AKA-47: Largely averted, although some weapons are simply given generic names instead (the RPG is simply called "RPG"). Curiously, in spite of this many of the actual models for the guns are different from their real-life counterparts.
 * And the Adventure Continues...:
 * Artificial Stupidity: The enemies in the game, among other things, won't notice when someone standing right beside them gets murdered, will charge the player in single file, won't take cover to reload, or will take cover behind explosive barrels. Even the own player character's support squad might as well not be there.
 * Badass: How you should feel when playing this game.
 * Big Bad: William Lennox.
 * Black and Gray Morality: William Lennox and Seventh Wave are a bunch of vicious, brutal terrorists - but the black ops team are running illegal international missions without any official government sanction, and are perfectly willing to utilize some pretty nasty methods to accomplish their goals.
 * Bloodless Carnage: Especially strange considering the fairly large amount of swearing in the game (it received an M rating in the US one way or the other).
 * Check Point Starvation: On normal difficulty, there'll only be two or three per mission, and the missions are very large.
 * Cold-Blooded Torture: Kellar himself tortures a Seventh Wave member in a cutscene in order to garner information about Lennox.
 * Crate Expectations: They show up fairly quickly.
 * Critical Annoyance: A typical Heartbeat Soundtrack when health is low.
 * Die, Chair, Die!: A lot of the buildings and structures are partly destructible to help the chaos and cinematic feel of the game.
 * Elites Are More Glamorous: You play as US Black Ops, but don't have any discernible branch.
 * Escort Mission: Inverted - there's a sequence where the player character has to make their way through an industrial plant while a support character provides sniper fire.
 * Excuse Plot: The game didn't even have a story for most of development - cutscenes, dialogue etc., were a last-minute addition. This is why, for example, most of the important characters only appear in cutscenes.
 * Exploding Barrels: Most of the levels are full to the brim with exploding barrels, and are often placed so the destructible environments can be shown off.
 * Faking the Dead: The main villain Lenox does this, to throw off suspicion, enough for him to take command of the Seventh Wave.
 * First Person Ghost
 * Full Motion Video: All the cutscenes are done this way, although the cutscene visuals are so heavily stylized that there isn't a huge disparity between them and the gameplay.
 * Gameplay Ally Immortality: The player character's support squad.
 * The Ghost:
 * Gotta Catch Them All: The secondary objectives.
 * Gun Porn: This was the game's tagline in ads, by the by. The gun models are all incredibly detailed, and the loading screens show guns firing and empty shells ejecting in slow motion. Many of the sounds of taken from or inspired by action films, and used a system dubbed 'chorus of gunfire' in which each gun is given a different pitch. So a group of enemies firing would create a harmony of different gunfire sounds.
 * How We Got Here: The levels are flashbacks, set four days before the interrogation cutscenes.
 * Hyperspace Arsenal: Averted, surprisingly for a game as over-the-top as this. Instead it uses a two weapon limit.
 * No Name Given: The man interrogating Kellar.
 * One Bullet Clips: Averted with the shotguns in the game, which load shell-by-shell and can be interrupted at any time, but otherwise played straight. The Magnum speedloader is particularly egregrious (in the "loading more rounds than the player actually has" sense).
 * Pistol-Whipping: Kellar can strike enemies with the butt of any gun. Striking them from behind is a One-Hit Kill.
 * Post Nine Eleven Terrorism Movie: The game's setting, though it doesn't figure much in the plot and Seventh Wave tends to fund and sell arms to terrorists than engage in them... or so we're told.
 * Revolvers Are Just Better: The Magnum is one of the most powerful guns in the game, a guaranteed One-Hit Kill on Normal difficulty for all but the strongest enemies.
 * Sniping Mission: The third mission features a protracted sniping section.
 * Standard FPS Guns: Several pistols, a couple of shotguns, a variety of sub-machine guns, a few automatic weapons, sniper rifles, a grenade launcher, RPGs - nothing you wouldn't expect from a typical FPS.
 * Stealth-Based Mission: There are parts of the game where taking a stealthy approach is beneficial, but they're never obligatory.
 * Stop Helping Me!: The support squad are prone to providing the player character with useless, unwanted instruction.
 * Stuff Blowing Up: Yes.
 * Terrorists Without a Cause: Very little information is provided about Seventh Wave besides the fact that they are terrorists, wanted by the Chinese and Israelis, and are mostly arms dealers.
 * Unorthodox Reload: Sort of... the way the guns are reloaded is pretty standard, but when you do reload the screen blurs as an exaggeration of depth of field. This system would also be used by the Goldeneye remake. There's also subtle differences if you reloaded from an empty magazine or from a partially full one.
 * Videogame Objectives: On the harder difficulties, there are more objectives to complete, but this usually translates to "more stuff to pick up/destroy".
 * Voice with an Internet Connection: Mostly from another female black ops soldier, MacCarver.
 * Walk It Off: If your health is very low the screen will flash black and white with a thumping heartbeat sound. The player has to take cover and wait for their health to go back up slightly.
 * Western Terrorists: Despite the post-9/11 setting, Seventh Wave appears to have exclusively Eurasian members. Their leader is even an American.
 * What Happened to the Mouse?: The other two members of your team disappear and appear at random, especially towards the end.
 * What Happened to the Mouse?: The other two members of your team disappear and appear at random, especially towards the end.