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In 1993, U.S. forces entered Somalia with one purpose in mind: to oust General Mohamed Farrah Aidid. You'd never know it playing Black Hawk Down, but there is indeed a backstory. Several years after the original PC version, Black Hawk Down hits consoles and shows us that, time after time, PC ports rarely make a smooth transition to the world of TVs, consoles, and controllers.
As the game begins and a profile is selected, the player is faced with a rather simple decision: assault, close quarters combat, sniper, or medic. Normally this would be a somewhat difficult decision, but as soon as level 1 begins, you'll soon realize that playing anything but assault is almost pointless. Black Hawk Down is a "shoot lots of Somalians" game, plain and simple, just as long as those Samalians aren't civilians. I, personally, love to just kill things and lots of them, but Black Hawk Down takes the joy right out of it. Perhaps console exclusive gamers will enjoy themselves more, but using the iron sights on the guns seemed almost like a cruel joke at times for two reasons: sloppy graphics made it difficult to discern between friend, foe, and neutral at any amount of distance, and the lack of precision of a controller makes things more difficult than they should be. Had I been playing on the PC, I surely would have used the iron sights, but for a controller, I felt almost forced to shoot without it, because enemies are then outlined in green and an auto-aim is enabled.
Most of Black Hawk Down is spent in urban combat. With a squad of soldiers at your disposal and voice based commands, it would seem that a great deal of strategy could be deployed. In theory, I suppose, it would work, but I found no need to actually controller my teammates. Run and gunning seemed to work just fine, and the AI was competent enough to save my ass a few times without my orders. Storming the occasional garage or building wasn't too difficult without orders; grenades work wonders. Well, they work wonders after you press every button on the controller looking for them. The control layout is absolutely horrid. Somehow "b" gets assigned to something as useless as binoculars and the d-pad gets one of the most important actions: kneeling, rolling, prone, etc. And none of this helps the fact that I hadn't a clue what I was doing half of the time. The objectives had a distance from overlay on the screen, but upon reaching the point, often nothing would happen.
All is not dead in Somalia, however. If Xbox Live is an option, Black Hawk Down becomes a much better game. Online menus and options are typical, including the ever so popular deathmatch and team deathmatch, as well as king of hill, capture the flag, and some others. Although small in comparison to some of the Tom Clancy games, many of the maps are rather large and make use of all class types available. Like with all quality online FPS games, a class system is present. Knife kills and head shots help to bring the point totals up, which in turn ups your class and adds some new abilities. If only vehicles were present in any form other than preconfigured rails, online play would actually make up entirely for the lack of quality single player. I much enjoy running people over with humvees as opposed to shooting them from the mounted guns, but there is no way to control the, for some reason indestructible, vehicles.
Although not much fun for the seasoned FPS veteran, Black Hawk Down had its moments. The settings were unique and large scale online battles were fun, but they did little to make me forget about the horrible and sluggish control schemes, outdated graphics, poor audio effects, and the fact that every single bullet that hit water produced the same unrealistic effect. If you pick up Black Hawk Down with the intentions mindless fun, perhaps it's worthwhile, but don't expect any sort of backstory or any reason at all to continue playing the game by yourself.
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