Looks and Feels polished, but soon reveals that its rusting out on the inside.
Lets start with the good points. There are a few things I really like about Black. First of all, it is fun. And no matter what I say in the next paragraph, it will remain the same, ultimately it is a fun game to play. Black also has some of the best looking graphics I have seen on the PS2 platform. It features permanent bullet holes, environment destruction (to quite a large extent for the console), great weapon models and fancy depth of field effects when you reload. Game play is usually fairly solid, fighting is satisfying due to the range of weapons at your disposal and the amount of objects that can be destroyed as you battle it out. One mechanic I particularly like is when you come close to death time slows to a crawl and the sounds of battle are drowned out by the booming of your heartbeat. This leads to many, truly epic near death moments.
Where Black falls down, is its complete and total lack of variety. It was like the developers couldn't think of what else to do but just throw more and more waves of brain dead enemies into the crossfire. I know it's much easier to talk about what developers should have done, but the only real game play feature we see is the 'destructible' environments. The game gives us ways to use them against our enemies, but after the 50th conveniently placed fuel tank, which may as well have a 'shoot me' sign on it, we aren't as excited by the idea of blowing the enemies to smithereens. The last point I would like to mention is that if you get frustrated, and value your controllers welfare, it might be wise to steer clear of black. All games have their frustrating points right? Black features sequences where you will walk down a long hall through a door, the door will then lock behind you, and swarms of enemies will appear all around you guns blazing. The only way to survive these sequences is to run around shooting, thats about it. There is no place to hide or fight from because enemies are spawning from every nook and cranny. Then finally when you think you have killed every enemy there is. Two more spawn behind impenetrable concrete barricades with heavy machine guns and tare you to shreds. This sequence almost made me scalp myself. Very similar were the sniping sequences. Both these and the sniping sequences seem to have been included in the game to mix things up a little, but both just make for a dose of frustration.
So if your looking for a pretty shooter which, is good fun, with bad moments. Buy black. Just buy some more PS2 controllers and a pack of chill pills, you will need them.