Blacksite: Area 51 Demo

The Blacksite: Area 51 demo is available on XBox Live Marketplace as a 584MB download. I've played through the demo a few times so lets get straight down to what's on offer.

It's night and you're in the middle of a thunderstorm. Rain bounces off the environment and you hear from the chatter between your team mates that you're here to locate another team that was lost a number of hours before. You take the lead and a communication box at the top of your HUD kindly tells you that you can command your two team members using the right bumper button. The command button is action sensitive, and working your way around the environment you soon find a door that your team mates kindly blow open once you issue the command.

When you get into the building the action starts aplenty as you see a large bipedal alien life-form attacking a civilian in a car. Of course you'd like to help him out but there's plenty of enemies that need to be taken care of first as your thrust into a firefight. Your team do a fairly good job of helping you out which gives you time to notice some destructible items in the environment.

Onto the next area and firstly you have to deal with some aliens that reminded me of "Starship troopers" as they scuttle up close and personal to take you out. As long as you keep your distance they won't give you any trouble and after you've finished them off you're ordered to carry on the search. At this point the game looks to get a lot more interesting as a large worm like alien impacts into the liquor store. You're treated to a nice matrix style slow mo as cars fly past from the impact and just as you're getting ready for a big ruckus that's when the demo ends.

The demo is a tight on rails affair with not much chance for exploration, and unfortunately it's all over far too quickly. The graphics are good, with some nicely detailed models using the Unreal 3 engine. However I did experience a bit of slowdown during the first firefight but hopefully this will be ironed out for the final release. The game is looking interesting, and offers a nice atmosphere, but at this stage I'm not sure what unique elements it's going to offer in the highly contested FPS arena. The game is due for release towards the end of the summer, and I'll be keeping an eye on its development.