BlackLight Tango Down (BLTD from now on) is a downloadable, multiplayer first person shooter. It’s available on the Playstation store for £9.99/$14.99 and gives you quite a lot for your money. It’s only a 673 megabyte download but features 13 maps, 7 game modes, plus a co-op black ops mode. BLTD is set in a near-future Russia, where city streets have become battlegrounds between two opposing sides; Blacklight, a team of Elite US commandos, and the Order, a team of rogue Ex-US commandos and local militia. This forms part of a plot but is completely ignored in the gameplay itself, you must go through the menus to read text on the background story.
Those of you familiar with first person shooters will instantly feel at home. The gameplay is very similar to most other online FPS, with there being two teams opposing each other in a variety of game modes. The game modes are pretty standard; deathmatch and team deathmatch are pretty self explanatory, ‘Retrieval’, basically a capture the flag mode but with data canisters instead of flags, ‘Detonate’, a neutral bomb is in the middle of the map and your team must capture it and plant it at the opponents base before they do the same to you, and ‘Domination’ in which there are control points placed around the map which must be captured to score points. The last two game modes are slightly different, being ‘Last Man Standing’ and ‘Last Team Standing’. They are exactly the same as ordinary Deathmatch and Team Deathmatch but with respawn off, so once you’re dead you’re dead for the whole round.
The game’s futuristic setting means many of the weapons you would expect in an FPS are there but have been modified to fit with the theme. Instead of stun or smoke grenades you can equip EMP and Digi grenades. EMP grenades will shut down and reboot enemy visors, causing their screen to show a reboot process that temporarily blinds them. Digi grenades will cause a visual area of denial where it exploded, causes the HUD to glitch and error out and causing disorientation. The game’s HUD is designed to fit with the futuristic theme, with lines of binary and icons all round the edge of the screen along with the expected weapons display, health bar and scoreboard. These can often become overwhelming, with lots of things moving on screen at once. The HUD also features a ‘Hyper Reality Visor’, which can be toggled with the directional buttons. This allows the player to see the positions of all enemies, objectives, health and ammo stations. It has a limited use bar which doesn’t seem to recharge and so it should only be used when necessary.
The maps are all relatively small and encourage fast-paced action, which is well suited to this game. It’s built on the Unreal engine which also means your character does move quite quickly compared to other FPSs and this adds to the action. The game features a health system, where you have a set amount of health which doesn’t recharge, and to refill it you have to stand near a health station. This helps to stop players just staying in one location as they need to find health.
The black ops mode features four maps, but the gameplay on each of them is relatively similar, with the player having to kill enemies until they stop spawning and then advance, and these are very linear. This mode can be played with friends but most people will stick with the multiplayer modes, which is where the fun is to be had.
The player earns experience points from playing the multiplayer modes which level them up, and unlock more customisation options. This is BLTD’s main strength, the huge range of customisation. There are five main types of weapon, with one base model in each. There are preset versions of the base model which can be used but it can also be customised to the user’s liking. The scope, magazine, muzzle, barrel, stick and weapon camo can be customised, giving a huge variety of options. A weapon tag can also be added, which is a small item attached to the side of the gun, there are over 100 of these, making the total weapon customisation possibilities huge.
Overall BLTD is a pretty good shooter being a downloadable title. It does have a few graphical problems here and there, and the menus can be hard to navigate when you first start. But the fast-paced gameplay and variety of game modes make this a perfect game to fill time, and easy to get into even if you only have a couple of games now and again.
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