A bit of a letdown, but not at all worthless
And I think that most gamers breathed a sigh of disappointment at what the game was. It wasn't bad by any standards... it just wasn't the face of God we'd been led to believe it would be.
Black's story is convoluted to say the least. It's highly political and a tad hard to follow. It's explained through what at first look like high quality FMV's, but which are actually just stylized live action video. You cannot skip these videos. You cannot skip the movie-like intro. It sucks.
Once you actually get into the game, you start to find out that it is very, very fun to make things go boom. Unfortunately, the level of boomage is not even close to what we were led to believe. Let's get a few things out of the way right now:
1) Not everything is destructible. Very few things are, actually. Bullethole sprites lay ontop of non-destructible surfaces and actually run off of corners like bad decals.
2) The things that are destructible are not really useful tactically. It was said that we would use things for cover only to have it be blown away, as would the enemy. That's a load of garbage. The only tactics you will get from destructibility is the obviously planted explosives near larger destructive things.
Once you have coped with those facts you can begin to enjoy the game based on its own merits. It's not too bad, actually. It's not amazing, but not bad.
Levels feel satisfyingly long, even though there aren't enough of them. Control is all right except for the bizarre method of customization for every button on the controller. It sounds all right but there are just too many commands. It feels like it all could've been handled in a much simpler way.
The crosshairs are not there... instead, you get a dot. It's not a bad little dot, and it's actually quite proficient at getting headshots with. Still, sometimes you'll fire at their head and they will take a blow to the shoulder and you'll begin to wonder just how President Kennedy really died.
The death animations and ragdolls are pretty good on the enemies, but unfortunately they are often too hard to take down. I understand the game wants you to shoot as much as possible, but I would prefer more enemies to a bunch of unreal super-strong ones.
Throughout levels there are goals and hidden weapons and things but you never really feel like it's all that essential to achieve them. For me, it was mostly a matter of "how soon can I get this game played and move onto something else?"
At the end of the day, Black is disappointing but still worth a rental. It's only a shame that it didn't live up to its hype... at all.