Blacklight: Tango Down

So Whose Fault is it that this budget online shooter is shit? The developers, or the last cancerous embers floating on the breeze from the smouldering pyre of Games For Windows - LIVE? Well, the fact is that at the time of writing hardly any bugger is playing this on PCs. When you read this, in the absence of miracles, there will be little more than a couple of servers twiddling their thumbs and glancing nervously at each other, wondering who'll be first to die. Seeing as Blacklight sits behind PC gaming's most notoriously stodgy bloatware, it's relatively easy to connect the dots. We're in a near-future Eastern European city, and the game's art style is, at least, rather interesting. It's like Tron, as imagined in the digital '90s, instead of flashbangs turning the screen white you're presented with a blue screen of death, and when you spawn into rounds of deathmatch, domination and the like you emerge with digital blurry flecks like a decloaking Predator.

As you pad around each map there's a handy HUD view you can use to see through walls and have useful items and opponent locations highlighted.

Meanwhile, there's a more-than-decent unlock system working in the background. And should you tire of the traditional Call of Duty multiplayer modes there are six short missions that can be played solo or in four-player co-op, A to B affairs that flood levels with gun-toting villains and what can only be described as the melee-homeless. Left 4 Dead it's not.

Lonely Game

The primary issue with Blacklight is having to wait an age to get even a half-populated multiplayer bout going. Once I had to wait 20 minutes for a team deathmatch game. You tell the matchmaking system what you want, it disappears behind a curtain and it then stumbles around the internet for an age before belatedly reappearing with a handful of high-level dicks who go digital on your arse. If there were browsable dedicated servers (as is right and proper) all could be well. But that's not how it works these days is it? In other news, the user interface is impenetrable and confusing, the map design dull and uninspired, and player movement sluggish in the extreme.

Whatever the price, in no sane world should Blacklight be played instead of Modem Warfare or Counter-Strike. Its only saving grace is that it shows, in the end-days, that GFWL was dead and buried first.