Blacksite: Area 51 is a squad based FPS in which you (eventually) get to shoot it out with aliens in, as you might expect, Nevada. With one of Blacksite's core production team members saying that "...the game was disastrously off rails." it's no real surprise that while Blacksite does have some fun moments, it's no COD4.

In fact, once the initial newness wears off and you start getting into some of the more poorly designed missions, not to mention outright bugs, the game really takes a turn from kind of fun to super annoying. It's almost as if the further into the game you get, the less attention it's received by the developers. As it happens, that's just how I felt: the further in I got, the less I wanted to pay attention to it.

As squad based shooters go, Blacksite is fairly simplistic. Your commands are essentially "go there" and "do that thing". Where there are doors to be opened, computers to be hacked or vehicles to be ridden in, there's a little squad icon that you point at and issue the "do that thing" command with the right bumper. The rest of the time, they pretty much try to stay out of your way and shoot at the bad guys. If you're doing well, then their morale will be high, and they'll be good at shooting the bad guys. Otherwise, not so much.

The one thing I find interesting about this game is that nobody seems to realize - or care - that we're fighting space aliens. There's plenty of "holy shit, what was that?", but never once (in the four or five hours that I played) does anyone actually acknowledge that we're obviously fighting space monsters. Nobody thinks it odd when I pick up what is obviously some sort of alien flak cannon, or when I use it to blow up the flaming floaty eyeball things that come out of the giant wormy things that come out of the ground.

My favorite part of the game was when I went through a gate in somebody's backyard and then fell through a hole in the world. Me and my squad, falling through the ether, shooting blindly into the green fog. Oh joy. When I drop $60 on a single player console game with a linear travel path, I expect that not to happen. Even so, when it did, I gave the game a rest, and came back a couple of days later to give it another chance. Silly me.

After carefully avoiding the hole in the map, the next sequence of events had me trying to shoot the pilot of a helicopter with a sniper rifle. Oh, and the helicopter was shooting rockets at me. That sucked. Took me four reloads to get it right. My comment after the first time: oh, this isn't fun. After the fourth time: if I don't get it here, I'm done. Luckily (depending on your point of view), I managed to bring the chopper down.

Next up (after some exposition) was another sniper shootout. From the roof of some building I'm supposed to protect some people from sniper in the hills. On the bridge. On other buildings. Problem was: they could see me, but I couldn't see them. All the while, my friends are yelling in my earpiece about "there's another one over there" and "what the hell are you doing?" and "take those snipers out before they kill us".

And which point, I exclaimed "this is fucking retarded, I'm going to play something else". Then a sniper shot me, and I did.