With many intense and exciting combats, Black is a nice experience that will entertain you by all means.
The Black's graphics can handle all the firefights, always getting a constant frames. Bullets holes, cars exploding, bodies on the ground, flames, many dust... and all this happens at the same time, together with some nice light effects, that completes the paint. It's really amazing what the PS2 is still capable to do.
Unfortunately, the history is a crap. It's hard to understand what it wanna tell you. In the introduction, you'll see two man in one room: one is you, the main character, and the other is some type of government guy, interrogating. Every time before a mission, they will "chat", like trying to explain to the player what is happening or at least, tell why you're doing that things. And this is why the history is a crap: it just don't tell anything and don't explain anything. You just enter in the mission, and send bullets for all over the places, making many women become widows without a plausible reason.
At least, the soundtrack is something worthy of a movie. The orchestrated musics just make all the firefights more immersible, and the sound effects are just amazing good.
Because of its length, I can't protest against the number of weapons. Even they being extremely fun to shoot, you won't make much difference about a Mac or an Uzi, or between a RPG or an grenade launcher. The main difference between weapons of the same type, it's the recoil and the number of bullets. Where they take the idea that the MP5 can carry 60 bullets in one loader?? But I think that is detail, one time that Black isn't to be a real simulator, it's more easy just shoot in the head... And you can use grenades, that you'll really want to use them. Besides they being extremely useful, you'll also discovery that is fun use them.
The AI can disappoint a little and, if wasn't the great number of enemies that appears at same time, you wouldn't have much difficult in deal with them. They don't know to use cover properly, they don't know to use grenades - even dropping some grenades when some of them dies, they also have a bad aim - in almost all the time. Some times, they can show a interesting behavior when under suppressing fire, but, in other moments, they just seems in not feel pain at all, ignoring the fact of being hit by bullets.. MANY bullets.
The lack of one cooperative mode and the lack of more extras just kill the replay value of the game. The only reason to play again, is if you liked a lot of the game - like in my case. Many say that the game is boring, but isn't. Almost 90% of time, you'll be firing at many enemies coming from everywhere, and you can do it in many ways: firing single shots on the head or firing like crazy or you can take them out in close combat - I recommend the "shotgun" to do the close combat service. You can also throw grenades to up more dust and make the combats more intense.
Now you can say that Black is repetitive. I don't, because the game is short. At first moment, you can take 30~40 minutes at each mission. But when playing a second time, you can beat it again in 5~10 minutes, mainly after familiarize with the controls.