Morale hits rock bottom
BlackSite also employs a morale based system for your team, but whether it works I couldn’t tell you. Apparently, your team’s morale depends on how well you’ve commanded them and will ultimately affect their aim and will to fight. I saw little evidence of how the morale system affected the game or my team-mates behavior and after a while I’d forgotten that they or the morale system even existed.Squad-based problems aside, BlackSite does have some highlights. The aliens look great and menacing as they lunge or scuttle towards you and there are some intense battles against these creatures and human opposition across a variety of great looking environments.
There are some great examples of a destructible environment, such as blowing pieces of wood to smithereens or blasting out a whole section of a stone wall, but once again the inconsistency sticks out like a sore thumb. In the Iraqi village you can brandish your gun, walk towards a statue in the square and take chunks out of it. The statue impressively breaks up into little pieces, crumbling into dust. Very impressive indeed! But, this destruction is extremely limited and the after effects of a bomb blast, the explosion of a Giant Worm or the riddling of bullets into the side of a car often have no effect on the environment. If I can do this to a statue, I’d assume I could pierce a hole in a water pipe -which is already leaking water - or shoot a hole in a wooden crate or take down any wall in the game with a barrage of bullets. You can’t. The destructible environment only applies to certain objects in the game, and demolishing the likes of the statue merely acts as a showcase of what could have been.
Click for larger imageIt’s these types of inconsistencies that really stand out in the game, hence the feeling that Blacksite doesn’t feel quite finished. Instead of the ‘all or nothing’ approach, it seems that they either gave up a certain point, ran out of time, or simply ran over budget.
