Blacksite Area 51 A dissapointment in everyway.

Awhile back when the demo for Blacksite Area 51 was released on Xbox live marketplace I was impressed. I thought the graphics were great and the game play while not incredibly innovative was good. But now a few months later upon the games release I have been underwhelmed in every way.

The story is horrid "Alien artifact brings dead soldiers back." None of the characters are even the least bit interesting in fact they are all stereotypes. The game play is slow and forgettable. The much talked about morale system is more or less useless because the AI is so brain dead. A fight near the end of the game is so annoying because the AI refuses to do its job. The point of the fight is that the boss has a weak spot on its back, the squad says split up and supply a distraction however once you have the attention of the beast the squad sits there and DOES NOTHING. And if you try to go for the kill shot the brain dead squad wont get the beasts attention and you wont be able to get the kill shot. A simple fight that should have taken no more then 5 mins took me more then 30 because of the AI.

The levels are bland and in certain missions too big. There is tons of pop in and tons of visual oddities such as your squad members running at a closed door disappearing and then reappearing next to you and it happens far to often. There are tons of collision detection problems which seems to be all to common in Unreal engine 3 games.

I wanted so bad to love this game as the Area 51 franchise has a special place in my heart from the arcade light gun game. But Blacksite under performs in every area: graphics, story, game play, multi player etc. It's hard for me to even recommend renting Blacksite. It's sad because I know I'm not the only one that wanted to like this game.