Blacksite feels like a recycled 8 year-old FPS with updated graphics, and boring repetitive gameplay.
You can hardly change any of the graphics settings, but in general they are good, and at least they make descent use of the havok engine to make things blow up nicely, including many objects you would normally hide behind. Now let's get to the bad things. Wait... You want to hear the good stuff first? Well, that's really about all of it... I've said a few nice things about the graphics, but it seems as though they put too much time into it, and not enough into what really matters, which would be the gameplay and smart AI that we were promised. It's quite pathetic to see the problems this game has, knowing how easy it would have been to fix them, and taking that little time away from the graphics. It's so bad that high-end systems get frequent framerate drops on this game when they run others (Crysis, UT3, etc) no problem at higher settings. Is this the reason it's on two DVD's? Seriously, WTF!?
I was really looking forward to this game in the past few months before it's release, and as soon as I started playing it, I had to force myself to keep going, hoping that it would get better. Don't get me wrong, it does get better, but in small intervals. You have to go through a bunch of pointless and annoying events before it gets interesting. Some of the events that do happen in the storyline could have been done much better, but no big deal. The storyline is a little weird and confusing, but not bad. I know I've used the word annoying a few times already, but it's one of the best words to describe your squad. They don't really do much except open doors that for some reason you can't open yourself. They can't shoot very well, and actually seem to shoot less when the enemies are in the open and only a couple meters away... I actually just stood behind cover and moved the squad into the open just to see what they would do, even to enemies standing right next to them, and they didn't do much... The only thing they're good at is throwing grenades, which they seem to do a very often...
As for the squad tactics? Useless, much like the squad themselves. Oh, and how about this morale system they told us about? Just as useless... Go run out in the open and mow a few people down, or pick off a few guys with some headshots, whatever it takes to get the high morale bonus. The only thing your squad will improve on is maybe shooting a couple more blind shots or throw a dozen more grenades. And when you see something you can command your squad to do, there is a rather large icon hovering in the air, which you pretty much have to be standing right next to in order to give your squad the command to interact with it. The interaction is always pretty much the same, just kick down that door, place a charge on this door, etc... And you don't get to choose which one, by the way... kinda defeats the purpose if you ask me.
Speaking of "AI" and "useless," the enemies are pretty dull as well. If there was a firefight between a few enemy soldiers and you're squad, it would never end. Your squad usually tends to stay behind cover, but many times you will find enemies running right into the open, and right into your bullets. They also seem to follow paths, and often spawn in clear sight. You will find many enemies spawning in plain sight, and it gets pretty annoying. It also seems that it's quite easy to take down enemy soldiers, while they have a hard time killing you, even though they're really accurate with their shots. That's not really a bad thing, but it eliminates any sort of a challenge, at least in the first couple hours of the game.
As far as the weapons go, I can't really say much because my mouse was having problems. By default, they set the middle mouse button to pick up a new weapon that's laying on the ground, and for some reason my mouse doesn't like that button... However that did lead me to realize that you cannot change ANY of the game settings while playing the game, you have to exit to the main menu, which can be difficult to navigate sometimes. Oh, and since when did assault rifles sound like pop-guns? Seriously, I've yet to hear any real gunfire in the game, it just sounds like a bunch of little plastic pop-guns going off... It's not a huge deal, but I had to make a note of it.
So overall, it seems like they wanted this game to be realistic, yet they're far from it. The gameplay is nothing but repetitive, the so-called tactics and morale system is useless, the AI just plain sucks, and many events that happen seem like if it was in a real situation, or even in a movie, it would have turned out so much different; usually in a better way. For example, a part near the beginning where you are on a mounted gun on a Humvee with one of your squad mates driving, every single thing that happens seems the opposite of realistic. You have to see it for yourself to understand, but it felt like going through an 8 year old game... They do let you drive eventually, but that's kinda pointless too, since the driving controls aren't that great, and the way the vehicles drive is just... horrible.
So... the game doesn't live up even close to the hype, and you need a pretty good system to run it efficiently. Even if you can run it, you practically have to force yourself to play through it if you want to see how the story progresses, or just get to a point in the game that starts getting interesting. Oh, and make sure you have plenty of hard drive space, it's over 10 gigs and on two DVD's, which really doesn't make sense, seeing they missed so much. They could have delayed the game one whole month, and seriously improved what they slacked on in this game, but it can't be helped now. I honestly don't think this game is worth playing. Maybe you can rent a console version, but don't get excited...