Our notorious editor reviewed the Xbox 360 version of this a few months back and was surprised and disappointed how sloppy the game looked and felt. Well let’s get the bad news out of the way – this PS3 version is identical.

Blacksite’s plot involves the small American town of Rachel, Nevada (it’s the nearest town to Area 51) being invaded by alien life forms. The government wants to keep the terrible secrets about Area 51 from the civilian population. The game starts off with you as a US soldier in Iraq, ordering your 2-man squad around like some kind of mishmash of Call of Duty/Ghost Recon/Rainbow Six. It’s not a good start, with Call of Duty 4 and Resistance so recent in the memory Blacksite’s visuals just don’t cut it. The characters are well-modelled but the lighting effects are ridiculously overdone so they glow and seem to have haloes surrounding them – they look pasted-on. The graphics look messy and the textures aren’t exactly high-res, so you’d think the frame rate would be slicker than a bowl of jellied eels, but its not, it jerks and even has horizontal tearing (which is supposed to keep a game running in-frame).

Perhaps wisely, Blacksite never tries to enter into CoD4’s sim-like territory and has unnecessarily HUGE flashing icons to indicate anything remotely interactive. That’s when you notice that dropped enemy guns or ammo etc. hover in mid air and/or flash like they’re radioactive, and then that enemy’s bodies disappear as soon as you turn your back. Why do developers make pickups so obvious in these days of high def graphics? Do they think we’re blind, or can’t be arsed to look for them? Surely this sort of thing belongs back on the 32-bit consoles, when graphics were so muddy that useable items needed to be highlighted. Blacksite’s first impressions are so bad that you may well be hunting out your receipt and the bag it came in long before you even see an alien life form…

You’d think that when playing any sci-fi shooter you can at least expect some imaginative or fun guns to play with… Nope, sorry. Blacksite has just 2 that I can remember (a scatter gun and a plasma rifle), and they’re both umm… CRAP -whatever planet you’re from. I killed the end “boss” (and oh boy is he a disappointment) and about 90% of the enemies in the game with a good old M16-looking assault rifle, and even the Army-supplied sniper rifle was rubbish.

Technically Blacksite seems to have some problems too, it often exhibits frame rate stutters and horizontal tearing, and on several occasions this became disturbingly jerky, like the game is about to crash. During one fight you have to try and shoot the pilot of a helicopter, and due to the jerky frame rate and the painfully slow speed at which you can pan the sniper rifle this borders on comical. On one Iraq level an entire floor failed to get drawn in, and I fell through the map! (and kept falling until eventually the game decided I was dead). When I retrod my steps the floor was drawn properly, and the level played properly. Clipping is a problem too, with the wheels of the Hummer sinking into the tarmac on several occasions, and other characters disappearing into walls and scenery.

Any which way you approach Blacksite, it’s a major disappointment, a game that rarely looks or feels finished and doesn’t even improve on the 360 version. The tacked-on vehicular levels and the unbelievably bad abseiling sections during the game are positively embarrassing. Or there’s another sequence where a Blackhawk helicopter smoothly swoops in to pick you up at the completion of a mission and flies straight through a tree… But I’d like to sum up on a positive note so I’ll just say that the on-rails Hummer ride that happens early on in the game was exciting and fun, and some of the set pieces (including the “Blackhawk ride” demo that’s available free on the 360 marketplace) were spectacular as long as you didn’t look too close. Blacksite’s cause isn’t helped by the fact that it arrives at the same times as Midway stablemate Unreal Tournament III, and I’d really recommend that you avoid this game and buy that, but if you’re a FPS addict/completist then maybe rent it or pick it second hand - if nothing else it’ll make you appreciate how polished some games are.