Blacksite: Area 51 Demo Review

There is something about first person shooters and alien invasions that just go together. Blacksite: Area 51's developers know this and have built the game around it. After playing the demo a couple times I generally like what I'm seeing. The demo starts with you arriving with your other 2 squad members at the edge of a small town. You have to search the area for another squad that stopped reporting in. Your squad is easy to command with a simple "point at what you want them to interact with and hit the right bumper" control scheme. There is not as much squad control depth as in games like GRAW2 or Rainbow Six: Vegas, but there is enough to have some help killing the aliens. The one thing I never did figure out about my squad was why they can take cover behind objects, but I can't.

The demo is pretty short. There are basically two fights between you and a group of attacking aliens and then it ends, but it is long enough to admire the destructible environments. Everything I found to shoot was damaged by my bullets including cars, gas pumps, walls, and signs. The items that you would expect to explode all do so if you shoot them enough. The graphics look good. The level of the demo is a night time outdoor area so I don't know if the whole game is like that or just this level, but it is not so dark that you can't see a large portion of the level.

There were a few things I found a little bit strange. First, the grenades seem very light. I could throw them much further than in other games. Also, you go through ammo very quickly, or at least I did. There was a spot to get more ammo after the first encounter with aliens so it was not like I was going to run out, but in the overall game is seems like you would need a lot of spots to get more ammo. Maybe if I did not waste my ammo blowing cars up it would have been plenty of ammo. Finally, you can jump by hitting the A button, but you only get about one foot off the ground. Why bother having a jump button if it is only a foot off the ground?

During the credits and screenshots after the demo ends it mentions that you'll be able to play through the game in co-op mode, but it does not say with how many people. Additionally, it mentions being able to drive vehicles in the game, but I never found any in the demo that I could drive.