Blacklight: Tango Down - Hands On Preview

Developing a download only first-person shooter and then claiming that it will have all of the content and values you'd expect from a full-priced retail title might sound like a bold, even foolhardy experiment, but Zombie Studios' Blacklight: Tango Down actually has a lot going for it, offering an Unreal 3 Engine powered FPS packed with multiplayer frills for the price of a mid-level download.

This is a game aimed at the Trials HD and Castle Crashers end of the download market then, but designed specifically with multiplayer longevity in mind. Boasting 12 small, medium and large maps designed to accommodate 2v2 to 8v8 matches across its 7 different game types, no one could accuse Blacklight of failing to be ambitious. Taking Battlefield 1943 as its initial touchstone in the quality and content stakes, the dev team has continued to add more and more to its game, aiming to "over deliver" on the title's promise as a retail standard shooter.

Sitting down for an extensive hands-on with Blacklight, given the choice of mouse and keys or an Xbox 360 controller, we give both a go, but opt for the latter given our history as a heathen console gamer. Happily, the default controls are borrowed wholesale from Modern Warfare, so getting into the game is as intuitive and immediate as it gets. Blacklight is incredibly fast-paced too, which Zombie Studios' Jared Gerritsen states is all part of Tango Down's remit as "great old school fun, which has been lost with a lot of shooters."

Having Blacklight's gameplay moving at a good lick has been one of the primary focuses during the game's development and besides achieving smooth, speedy action, there are a few subtle innovations  that are also worthy of mention. Firstly, there's the dynamic spawning AI that works something like Left 4 Dead's AI director, placing enemies in random locations every time you play through the 4 mission campaign - which supports 4-player co-op - encouraging repeat visits to the game's story. Then there's the introduction of powerful sentry turrets, which guard yours and the opposing team's spawn zones, preventing cheap players from camping and picking off rivals as they materialise into a match. A funky Hyper Reality Visor (HRV), that enables you to draw a bead on players through walls, acts as an additional restriction on camping, although it can only be deployed in short, rechargeable bursts so you can't keep it constantly active.

We're here to exclusively look at the multiplayer, sampling a dose of straight up team deathmatch to begin with. And Blacklight certainly looks and feels solid, proving immensely compulsive to play thanks in no small part to how straightforward it is to get into the game. Custom load outs keep things fresh and interesting too, and a persistent delivery of XP leading to rank promotions, unlockable weapons and equipment provide further impetus to keep playing. Weapons also have up to 25 different parts that can be applied to create potentially thousands of different permutations, including colours and patterns, tags and special perks. Heavy and light armour types dictate the amount of gear you can carry and the speed at which you can move respectively, so there are plenty of different options to tinker and play around with in order to define your own game experience.

There's adequate variation in Blacklight's multiplayer maps, although the theme seldom strays from scenes of decrepit, urban decay in what we're shown. Slumlord is a stage set in and around the grounds of a crumbling, derelict house, painted in the game's favourite colour - concrete grey. This is the near-future after all, and mankind has been infected by a terrible virus, so inevitably the entire world is drenched in dank and dreary hues. Shadowmarket is a little more exciting to look at with its deserted, litter strewn streets and flashing neon signs. This is the venue for a game of control point capture, which just like team deathmatch, provides the same kind of rapid gameplay.

Domination, as it's called in Blacklight, pits two teams against one another to take control of 4 command posts dotted around the map. Like much of Zombie's game, there's a twist to capturing the consoles and turning them to your team's colour, rather than simply standing in the vicinity and waiting for a flag to be raised. Instead, you have to beat a simple-Simon style QTE hacking mini-game on the D-pad, which actually works pretty nicely. This is merely one way in which Blacklight toys with some of the established FPS genre conventions. Viewing the world through your visor, the screen is framed by a peripheral vision of your helmet interior, and as such, smoke grenades create an area of distorted pixels, and flashbangs temporarily wipe out your vision with a bluescreen crash. These are neat little flourishes that give Blacklight a certain element of the unique in an otherwise well-worn and somewhat clichéd setting.

Blacklight is shaping up to be quick, frenetic fun and even though it doesn't quite live up to its proposed retail level status at present, for a projected price of 15 Euros you'll be hard pushed to complain about any supposed shortcomings. Sure, it's a bit rough around the edges at the moment and the weapons could use a little more of a kick as they currently err a little on the feeble side in terms of handling where a bit more recoil and impact wouldn't go amiss, but there's ample time for extra polish and refinement before the game's release in the summer. Feature-wise, Blacklight appears to offer the complete package with its player reward system and full-fat campaign and multiplayer modes, all for a price that represents fantastic value for money. Whether it measures up to the Zombie's lofty plans however, might be another matter entirely, although at this stage the initial signs look rather positive.