E3 2010: Blacklight Tango Down (Hands On)
posted:
6/16/2010 2:26:00 AM
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E3 2010
Blacklight: Tango Down
As someone who likes First Person Shooters I was interested to finally play Black Light Tango Down after seeing the game at PAX East but not getting a chance to play it. Set 25 years in the future, Blacklight Tango Down tells the story of the PMC group Blacklight who must try to find out what happened to their lead officer after his helicopter went down in enemy territory.
The game has a few unique features going for it. The first is that the game allows you to build your own guns from various combinations of stocks, scopes, and barrels which provide millions of unique weapons combinations.
The second big feature is the Hyper Reality Visor (HRV) which allows you to flip a switch on your visor and receive real time battlefield intelligence including the locations of the rest of the bad guys on the screen.
I got the chance to play the PC version of the game on the show floor and I was fairly impressed with how tight the gameplay was. The game is a bit more realistic than other shooters as it only takes a few bullets to die which makes finding cover and using the HRV system all the more important. You can’t shoot when you have the HRV on and it takes a few seconds for it to turn off so using the system forces you into a nice risk vs. reward decision every few seconds.
I found myself turning the unit on when I re-spawned to quickly survey the field before turning it off to hunt down my prey. It worked for the most part as you can kind of see where people are headed and it makes the feature very unique. I do think this will be a much more useful feature in team modes as you could have one person spotting and one person shooting but I did not get to try that out.
I only got to try out the deathmatch mode (one of seven modes in the final game) on a fairly small map (12 total) but I was intrigued by how quickly I got sucked into playing the game once the PR person let me have free reign. The final game maxes out at 8 v. 8 which seems a bit low to someone who’s spent a lot of time playing 32 player Battlefield:Bad Company 2 matches but the more intimate maps could make that a very intense experience. There’s a lot of potential here and at only $15 I could see Blacklight Tango Down becoming a very easy buy decision.
The game has a few unique features going for it. The first is that the game allows you to build your own guns from various combinations of stocks, scopes, and barrels which provide millions of unique weapons combinations.
The second big feature is the Hyper Reality Visor (HRV) which allows you to flip a switch on your visor and receive real time battlefield intelligence including the locations of the rest of the bad guys on the screen.
I got the chance to play the PC version of the game on the show floor and I was fairly impressed with how tight the gameplay was. The game is a bit more realistic than other shooters as it only takes a few bullets to die which makes finding cover and using the HRV system all the more important. You can’t shoot when you have the HRV on and it takes a few seconds for it to turn off so using the system forces you into a nice risk vs. reward decision every few seconds.
I found myself turning the unit on when I re-spawned to quickly survey the field before turning it off to hunt down my prey. It worked for the most part as you can kind of see where people are headed and it makes the feature very unique. I do think this will be a much more useful feature in team modes as you could have one person spotting and one person shooting but I did not get to try that out.
I only got to try out the deathmatch mode (one of seven modes in the final game) on a fairly small map (12 total) but I was intrigued by how quickly I got sucked into playing the game once the PR person let me have free reign. The final game maxes out at 8 v. 8 which seems a bit low to someone who’s spent a lot of time playing 32 player Battlefield:Bad Company 2 matches but the more intimate maps could make that a very intense experience. There’s a lot of potential here and at only $15 I could see Blacklight Tango Down becoming a very easy buy decision.
