Black Hawk Down - Gamespy review

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Despite the entire game being set in the sandy streets of Mogadishu, Black Hawk Down's missions somehow manage to maintain a unique feel without getting too repetitive. You play a variety of anonymous soldiers, from members of the 10th Mountain Division all the way to Delta Force, often fighting alongside other soldiers.

In some ways, Black Hawk Down's mission objectives could easily be confused with Medal Of Honor: Allied Assault: protect a convoy; destroy a bridge; take out a radio tower; sink a ship; capture high-ranking enemy personnel. Some of the missions require you to use night vision almost exclusively, and there are even a few moments where you may be required to protect a fallen teammate until a chopper can airlift them to safety. Most of the time, you'll be running around on foot, but a number of missions also have you riding along the ground in a Humvee or in the air in a Black Hawk or "little bird" chopper. A compass in the lower right is perhaps your most valuable tool (aside from your weapon, of course), constantly directing you to your next waypoint and even showing the location of enemy fire.


One of the early convoy escort missions.

Even with objectives changing constantly in the heat of battle, Black Hawk Down is basically a shoot-the-bad-guys affair … and there are a LOT of bad guys. True to the actual conflict, you'll often find yourself totally outnumbered with as many as hundreds of enemies chasing you down, often riding on the back of trucks with .50 cal machineguns, and it doesn't take more than a few shots to put you down. You can only carry one primary weapon throughout a mission, you're totally unable to pick up enemy weapons, and ammo and health boxes are scarce. Complicating matters is a save game system that only allows you to save a set number of times during each mission.

This might sound unnecessarily difficult, but in practice, these elements blend quite well. I have no idea what things were really like on the ground in Mogadishu, but Black Hawk Down creates a sense of utter chaos and panic that you have to fight to keep under control. You can't just run out in the open, or you'll instantly get cut to pieces; nor can you quicksave every 10 seconds. Health and ammo boxes seem to appear when you need them most, providing a much-needed boost just when things are looking their worst. In the middle of all this action, you'll suddenly find yourself engaging in strategic resource management, trying to make sure you have enough health, ammo and even save games to get you to the next key waypoint.

Since your character can't survive more than a few hits, the tension level in Black Hawk Down is usually high on the white-knuckle scale, especially in the larger outdoor levels where enemies can be waiting behind any corner (or sniping from any rooftop). Thankfully, you're still about 9 or 10 times stronger than most of the enemies you'll face, who usually drop with a single bullet; even technicals (trucks, jeeps, etc) explode after just a few shots.

More than just strength, however, your character is clearly smarter than anyone you'll meet in Mogadishu. Sometimes enemies react to gunfire, sometimes they don't. Mostly, they just run around in the open, waiting to get shot, with AI routines no smarter than your typical Serious Sam baddie.


Your "teammates" often aren't much of a help.

And, despite an entire page in the manual on "team orders," your squadmates aren't much better, often standing around idly when they should be firing at bad guys. You can rarely order them to attack when you need it most; the only time they lead the way is when you get the special "room takedown" icon, which is more of a novelty throughout the game than anything else. Most of the time, your teammates let you take the lead and use you as a human shield (hey, maybe these guys aren't that dumb after all!) No, the only time anyone does anything smart is when they've specifically been programmed to do so, which leads to some of BHD's most troubling issues…

Fighting The Invisible Enemy

The biggest problem with Black Hawk Down is that it simply doesn't play fair a lot of the time. Fighting against the superb enemy AI in Halo or Half-Life was practically a sport unto itself; you usually knew where the enemies were (or you had tactical methods of flushing them out), and no matter what the odds, a properly trained soldier always had some hope of surviving any battle intact.


Beware of snipers!

There's no such hope in Black Hawk Down. Like Medal of Honor's infamous "Snipertown" level, traps are laid throughout the game, often making it next to impossible to get through a level without getting killed a few times. You will die often in Black Hawk Down, and usually it will happen so fast you won't even know what window or rooftop the final bullet came from. You can peek around corners all you want, but it's almost mandatory that you sacrifice yourself a few times just to figure out where the enemies are, which is neither realistic nor fun (especially if you haven't saved in a while).

One particularly frustrating mission comes about halfway through the game, when you're approaching a beach by boat with a team of soldiers. You're spotted from the shore and enemies immediately begin bombing the beachhead. There's virtually nothing you can do about the mortars as you attempt to navigate a minefield on the beach; either they hit you or they don't. If you're lucky enough to make it, you better use one of your precious saves or you may just have to do it again.


What happens when you don't catch an RPG in time.

This also comes into play on the chopper and Humvee rides, where you'll often face RPG-toting enemies, who can end any mission with a single shot. There's no strategy involved with fighting these guys; it's simply a matter of memorizing their locations until you can make one successful pass through the area. This is not a fair fight and it's not good game design; each reload reminds you that you're simply playing a game, constantly pulling you out of the amazing atmosphere the game so wonderfully creates. Your GPS compass is a godsend; adding some sort of heartbeat sensor or radar to detect enemies could have gone a long way towards evening things up.

And still, this isn't a fatal flaw for Black Hawk Down; it's merely a momentary inconvenience. Once you've figured out where all the traps are, plotting out a course to get around them is one of the true joys of the game.

As an added bonus, Black Hawk Down has a solid multiplayer component, playable exclusively over NovaLogic's own NovaWorld service. You'll need to create a free account to play, but once you're set up, there's a wide assortment of games available. These are mostly variants of games we've seen before: deathmatch, King of the Hill (both in free-for-all and team versions), Capture the Flag, "Attack and Defend," "Search and Destroy", and even a 1-flag CTF variant called "Flagball".

These games adhere to most of the same rules as the single-player game -- you get only one primary weapon, there's no health or ammo to be found in the field, and it only takes a shot or two to kill you. As a result, the game is a sniper's paradise; if your idea of fun is picking out a camping spot picking people off till the cows come home, you could probably get your money's worth out of Black Hawk Down's multiplayer alone. I don't fall into this category, but I still had a blast with many of the modes, especially CTF, which should really stand for "Collect the Flags" -- each team has multiple flags scattered around the map, which teams race to collect. It's a shame that the majority of servers are running Team Deathmatch; I played four consecutive amazing 8-on-8 CTF games that all ended 12-11, but have yet to find a hopping CTF server since.


You can even ride the Black Hawk in multiplayer.

One of the more interesting aspects of the multiplayer games is the way vehicles are integrated. Humvees roll around in a predetermined path, but you're free to jump into a turret, which can often provide you with a few free kills when the enemy isn't expecting it. Black Hawks also make regular flights around the levels; while you can't actually pilot the choppers, I was amazed the first time I realized I could actually hop in and deal out some death from above while manning a minigun. At one point, we had a team of three snipers packed into a Hawk, and it was just fun.

Going back to the subject of finding servers: yes, I'm an employee of GameSpy and you can therefore accuse me of some bias, but trying to find a game using the NovaWorld interface is just plain painful. It's more or less an embedded HTML interface with almost zero functionality -- you can't ping individual servers, you can't create a "favorites" list, it's hard to tell when a server is really full -- all you can do is reload the entire list, pick a server and cross your fingers. I've been using GameSpy3D exclusively since 1997, and even back then that product had more functionality than the current NovaWorld browser. If nothing else, the multiplayer interface looks woefully outdated when compared with the rest of the game.

The Sights of Somalia

Night vision is required for a few missions.

On the topic of visuals, I was pleasantly surprised with Black Hawk Down's graphics. For a game not licensing any of the major engines, it holds up extremely well. The city of Mogadishu is well detailed, as are the player and weapons models. Choppers kick up dust when near the ground, there's a nice night vision effect, and explosions are nothing short of spectacular, especially when you hit an incoming technical and tires go flying in every direction. There aren't many cutscenes to speak of, nor are there tons of scripted sequences (as in Allied Assault), but many of the scenes have a cinematic quality to it, as if the game had jumped off a movie screen and onto your desktop.

All this eye candy comes at a serious price, however. You will need a hardcore machine to keep BHD running smoothly, and for me, a PIII 1.8 Ghz machine with a GeForce 4 Ti 4200 running at 800x600 (which is above the recommended specs) was barely enough. Since the game often penalizes you for hitting civilians, this is a game where you want to have the details cranked so you can tell whether that figure in the distance is armed or not, which makes the technical requirements that much more frustrating. It's hard enough trying to hit someone while bouncing along in a speeding Humvee or trying to keep your aim steady from the belly of a Black Hawk; simultaneously fighting a stuttering framerate only compounds the challenge. Odds are you'll need to make a few sacrifices to keep the frames flowing.

The Final Word

Your convoy finally makes it to safety.

I'll admit it: with the Delta Force series in decline, I wasn't expecting much of Black Hawk Down when it was first announced; nor did I give it much thought when the game was delayed a few months ago. However, it appears the developers made the most of the extra time - it's hard to think of many things that could have been corrected without totally overhauling the game and starting from scratch.

Black Hawk Down isn't without its flaws, but the team at NovaLogic has done a great job balancing most of them out and creating an exciting first-person shooter in the process. If you find yourself in the need for a good military-themed action game, there's a good chance you'll find one here. •

The opinion voiced by Gamespy is not necessarily the opinion of CPD

Personally, I like the NovaWorld servers.