Customer Reviews

Blacksite: Area 51

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

I think black site has done very well with this game. even though i put 4 stars i think this is 3.5. Graphics are well designed but the programmers should make adjustments with the weapons. Just add more because most of the time you only have a machine gun. Im not saying thats a bad thing its just the game should be a bit more challenging. If they make another patch for this game MAKE MORE WEAPONS! This game looks like its on the border line for being an T-M game. Its a bit like gears of war and halo mixed but just more scary.

I find it hard to like squad shooters. Your squad members are either dumber than the bullets that mow them down or get in your way. This is advertised as a squad tactical game.

Tactics? What tactics? Giving squad orders had never been considered tactics - why should we start now? No, this is in no way a tactical game. Save that description for, say, DEUS EX or even the RAINBOW SIX series.

Moreover, your squad-members respawning subtracts substantially from the game's immersion factor. On the other hand, the enemy AI is quite high. You still can pretty much finish the game by rushing head-first, but the game makes you work - and pay - for it.

Although not cutting edge, the graphics are very nice, the lighting and shadows realistic and the environments and objects are almost all interactive (BLACKSITE-AREA 51 shares the same environment-interaction routines with a much better game, STRANGEHOLD - if you like check out my review on it as well). The conspiracy brewing atmosphere is successfully conveyed - and the weather effects add another nice touch.

On the other hand, the enemy designs they managed to fumble. The aliens are a collection of a mix of poorly developed and, let's say, older ideas.
Do you remember the HALFLIFE crabs? Check.
Do you recall HALFLIFE-2 antlions? Check (only with more horns and with firepower - and a mine that pops out when left for dead).
Do you remember the coffee&nicotine-addicted aliens in MEN IN BLACK? Check (only larger and meaner).
Do you remember the big bug-tank in STARSHIP TROOPERS? Check (only more segmented).
What finally tipped the scale against this game, however, was the poor quality control: clipping was too widespread, stuttering too frequent and freezing unavoidable.

A good effort that barely makes par. The overall feeling of this game is that it got started after a very creative brainstorming - but then was left to develop...itself.
Only for conspiracy buffs willing to overlook its serious flaws. And even then, wait for the price to drop.

Good Game , though the game is a bit buggy and many items in the game are not in real time,the developers need some real time behind some real weapons before they try to make a game,overall it was a good game,needs work

hawk1234

My PC has more than the minimum requirements but the game still plays very choppy. The game has bugs and crashes even after I downloaded the patch from the Blacksite website. The content of the game is mostly the same old sci-fi stuff that is already out but I like that sci-fi stuff. If it was not for the bugs I would give the game 4 stars but with all the problems I don't think the game is not worth it. The game might play better on a different platform than PC.

From beginning to end, this game is full of surprises. You have to work at finding the hidden dossiers and explore everywhere. More than just run and shoot, you have to think and work out strategies. This game is addictive and playing more than once is still a lot of fun.

Amazon makes it almost too easy to purchase things. I am 73 years old and in my second childhood.
BlackSite, Area 51 is one of those "Unable to stop Playing" games. Graphics are terrific if your computer is fast enough and
will handle the game. Mine will and the game is great.

I recommend Amazon and also recommend to game.

Thanks, Larry

It seems like I've had this game on my wish list forever, but didn't get it until now because of the poor reviews. If you're a fan of sci-fi futuristic FPS games, then you can't go wrong with this game at the price it's selling at. I paid $10 and this is probably the best bang for the buck I've ever seen. And yet it gets less than three stars (at least before I added mine).

The first thing you'll notice is that it has remarkably good graphics, even by today's standards. It may not be like Crysis, but it's still competitive with much of what's out there today.

Overall, this game is very typical of the genre of games that fall into the same category as HalfLife 2. Not quite as sophisticated, but it still has some surprising effects, fairly good weapons, creative monsters, and nicely rendered scenery.

Before I started playing, I installed one patch (1.2 I think) and I had zero technical problems with the game. There was one instance where the team members couldn't manage to get through a doorway which they had to go through to continue the game. I restarted from the very recent checkpoint and the problem was gone. No other issues at all. The game ran smoothly with everything set to max on my 3GHz Core 2 duo, 4 GB RAM, and dual SLI-linked 8800GTS 512 GPUs. I'm running Vista x64. It has a long list of screen resolutions and aspect ratios, so it will probably adapt to whatever your graphics capabilities are.

It doesn't have user invoked saves. It saves at "checkpoints" which happen frequently enough that you won't find yourself playing for 20 minutes just to get killed and have to start over again. I played on the middle difficulty setting which is called "HARD". I found it a little easy at that level, so you may want to give the highest difficulty a try. You can change the difficulty level whenever you load up the game, so if you want to change part way through, it's no problem.

Weapons are typical: pistol, assault rifle, sniper rifle, rocket launcher, plus a futuristic scatter gun and plasma rifle. Ammo abounds, so you're not likely to run out very often. There are also turrets on the ground, on Humvees, and in the helicopters that you can use.

Health regenerates by itself, but when the screen gets red, you need to duck under cover and recover from your wounds, which happens fairly quickly.

You drive a Humvee during parts of the game and, unlike most games, it steers using the mouse rather than the keyboard. I found that much easier to control and it was almost like driving a sports car (except it really didn't go that fast). I rarely enjoy vehicle driving sequences as much as I did in this game. You need to maneuver the Humvee through rough terrain and wreckage to get past some of the monsters which added considerable excitement.

You have a team of a couple guys (actually one is a girl) that you can command to move ahead or target specific bad guys. Like many games, the team members don't really do much to kill bad guys, because that's what you're playing the game to do. You don't want them steeling your fun, do you? How well the team performs is based on morale which changes depending on how well you're doing. With high morale, they are supposedly more effective. The morale level flashes on the screen and is apparently enhanced when you give the team targeting directions.

The story line is typical. I don't pay a lot of attention to story lines, so I don't find them critical to game enjoyment. Throughout the game, you come upon "dossiers" that you can collect. I missed several and never even looked at most of them, but they most likely enhance the story line a bit.

The game was probably about average length. It didn't take me as long as Fallout 3 or STALKER, but it seemed longer than the two Crysis games. Yes, it's linear, but I consider that just the style of game it is and don't count linearity as a negative. In fact, I prefer it to the open field games like STALKER.

My rating of five stars is based on the quality of the game for the extremely low price. I would still rate it at four stars even if it were pricier, though. I highly recommend this game for people who like traditional futuristic shooters. It's enjoyable, easy to learn, and frustration free.

Not the best of PC Games, but worth the price. Give it a try. This comes from a die hard FPS person. I ran this on Vista and did not have any problems.

Having loaded and removed this game 5 times and still it won't load to the start up screen, it's a dud. Looking at all the comments on the web, lots of people are having the same or similar issues. All video and audio drivers as well as XP updates are current. ( intel dual core processor, 3 GB ram, ATI 4570 PCIe display card, Acer 22 inch flat screen monitor, sound blaster extreme PCI audio card, DVD R/W drive.)

Don't waste your money on this game or anything else from Midway until they get their act together.

I was pretty surprised by this game. It received pretty terrible reviews elsewhere, and when one of my own squad dropped a grenade in our midst within the first few minutes of playing, I nearly exited the game and uninstalled it. I decided to stick with it and ended up rather enjoying it. I finished it in two or three days, as it's maybe 6-8 hours long.

There are many tense moments and exciting scenes. The action changes fairly regularly, from defense to assault, driving to shooting on rails, and between enemies and bosses. Some of the set pieces are pretty exciting, such as being surrounded by enemies, being flooded by enemies while manning a turret, dodging a huge boss while it attacks you through the buildings, and manning a gunship to attack a huge boss that's blocking a bridge.

I do have some complaints. It was a little stale and a little ordinary. The last boss was a letdown, and some boss fights were awkward because of your squad not helping you as they should. I had some in-game scripts break and I had to restore my last checkpoint save in order to get by the glitch. Normally I hate checkpoint saves, but it wasn't annoying at all in this game.

If you do give it a try, I suggest you play on Hard for a reasonable challenge. Easy is rather easy. You can always change your mind later and not lose any progress you've made.