Black

Black from Criterion Games was a straightforward action shooter built around environmental destruction and a strong audiovisual presentation — explosions, crumbling walls, and deafening gunfire were meant to convey to the player a sense of genuine wartime chaos. The story of mercenary Jack Keller, interrogated over a secret operation, mainly served as a framework for a series of intense, linear missions without an open world, focused above all on spectacularly demolishing the scenery using an extensive arsenal of real military weapons.

The Xbox version was released simultaneously with the PlayStation 2 release and used the console's somewhat more powerful hardware for smoother rendering of the destructible environments and effects that were the core of the gameplay — on PS2, the most demanding firefights saw a more noticeable framerate drop and worse readability of the action amid smoke and debris. Controls and game content remained practically identical between the versions, with Xbox only offering a sharper image, more pronounced lighting effects, and more stable performance in the most hectic sections where entire parts of buildings collapse at once. The sound design, with hundreds of layered effects and loud orchestral music, remained the same on both consoles and was among the things the game most wanted to impress with.

The game was praised by critics mainly for its audiovisual execution and its well-crafted gunfight action, less so for its very short playtime — the campaign could be finished in a handful of hours, which was true equally for both versions and set Black apart from bulkier shooter competitors of the time, such as the contemporary Call of Duty or Medal of Honor entries. Publisher Electronic Arts presented the game mainly as a technological showcase for Criterion Games, which a few years later would become famous mainly for the Burnout series, and both console versions of Black served as a demonstration of how far environmental destruction in action games could be pushed.

Why play it: For fans of well-crafted, audiovisually lavish gunfight action, Black offers a short but intense campaign and a showcase of the environmental destruction that Criterion Games would later become famous for with the Burnout series.