I'm kind of in love with the idea behind Blacklight: Tango Down. Here's the gist: Take the persistent multiplayer component popularized by the Call of Duty and Battlefield franchises, surgically remove all the story mode fluff, and put whatever's left up for download at the bargain-bin price of 15 bucks. Based on the number of people I know who've never even fired up the single-player campaign in their copy of Battlefield: Bad Company 2, I'm actually surprised more developers haven't taken a crack at Blacklight's affordable, online-only approach to first-person warfare.
Despite its budget-priced status, Blacklight's stocked with nearly all of the amenities you'd expect from a post-Call of Duty 4 FPS. You know the drill by now; killing enemies and accomplishing objectives nets you experience points, which contribute to your overall rank. Rank up enough and you unlock new weapons, armor, and other equipment for personalizing your character. These include your typical upgrade fodder like improved scopes, stocks, and barrels for your guns, but there are also just over 100 special trinkets (think keychains or fuzzy dice) that inexplicably imbue your faceless soldier with additional stats when hung from your weapon. It's a bit silly, sure, but it's also one of the more original aspects of Blacklight.
Developer Zombie Studios' other minor innovations mostly revolve around Blacklight's HUD. According to what little fiction the game's menus have to offer, the near-future grunts in Blacklight are all outfitted with Hyper Reality Visors -- basically, helmets that allow you to briefly see through walls at the press of a button. Other players can counter this by tossing items called digi-grenades to pixellate sections of your vision, or by lobbing an EMP to temporarily blind you altogether. Cool as that might sound, it's ultimately just a different spin on the same flash-bang and smoke grenades we've been chucking at each other since the '90s.
Aside from those negligible tweaks, however, Blacklight plays it relatively safe with the Infinity Ward formula. And therein lies the problem: Zombie's game never feels like anything more than Call of Duty on a shoestring budget. Maybe it isn't fair to expect a downloadable game to deliver on the same level as a full retail release, but I can't pretend Blacklight is a great FPS simply because it costs less than $20, either.
