Did anyone else read the
"Blacklight: Tango Down" review at Eurogamer? My god. I mean, I don't intend to bite
the hand that feeds me, and I definitely don't want to defend a game I haven't played / looks mediocre anyway, but I'm afraid I'm going to have to risk an ungrateful nibble here:
"All the major functions are present, correct and mapped exactly where you'd expect to find them."
So it copied Halo's control scheme on the X360 -- or, as we would say in PC-land, it has keyboard bindings! Awesome.
"The sprint feels a bit sticky..."
I don't know what this means. When you sprint, you stick to surfaces? When you sprint and let go of the button, you continue to sprint? When you sprint, sticks fly out of your screen and poke you in the eye?
Must game controls necessarily feel responsive, or can they be "sticky," whatever that means, by design? (e.g. in Team Fortress 2, the Heavy's slower aiming / movement when firing the minigun) Would you criticize the Heavy Weapons class for moving too slowly, or the Scout for moving too quickly, or the player character in
the Graveyard for handling like a shopping cart -- when it is all by design?
If a playtester ever told me that the "sprint feels a bit sticky" or that I had to
"tighten up the graphics", I'd probably stickily sprint off to the front of the nearest speeding bus.
"... but the genre basics are pretty much as they should be."
By using the word "but" after talking about sticky sprinting, the reviewer flags this as a compliment. I thought the problem was that this game was too average, and now suddenly it's good that this game follows conventions? And why is it necessarily a strength that the game keeps to "genre basics"? The tone of this review keeps going back and forth between "not different enough from AAA games" and "not similar enough to AAA games." Which is it?
"... it's only really co-operative in the sense that you're playing alongside other people."
I understand what the reviewer means, but still -- this is an amazingly dumb thing to say because cooperative play means... well, playing alongside other people. It's like saying "it's only singleplayer in the sense that you play by yourself."
But here's the part of the review that originally got me thinking, "what the hell is he talking about?!"...