General Tips

Like Ducks In A Barrel

One of the tricks of the trade in Black is the fine art of shooting grenades after you've thrown them. When you throw a grenade at an enemy, they'll usually book it for cover in whatever direction will get them the furthest away from your payload in the shortest amount of time. They're fast, too, and will usually succeed in getting out of harm's way before the grenade detonates. Since you can't cook your grenades by holding onto them, your only real option when attempting to grenade an opponent will be to rely on the almighty shoot-the-grenade trick.

'I can flyeeeeeee!'

It's pretty simple, really; when you chuck a grenade, quickly bring your crosshairs back down to the area where you threw the grenade and start firing at it. While you might think that a grenade would be an awfully small target to hit, the game gives you the benefit of the doubt in most cases, and so long as your crosshairs are anywhere near the grenade, it'll instantly blow up, hopefully before your target is able to run. This is obviously going to be most useful against hard targets like masked and riot shield enemies, who can take a huge amount of damage before finally going down.

Know Your Enemies

There are three basic types of foes in the game: normal soldiers, masks, and riot shields.

Normal soldiers are pretty much just grunts, but there are around 1,500 of them in the Seventh Wave army, so you're going to have to take a bunch of them down before you complete the game. These guys wield SMGs, assault rifles, and RPGs, by and large. Shooting them in the chest is an effective way to take them down, but if you manage to get a headshot on them, they'll go down in one shot, accompanied by an appropriately satisfying "plink" sound as their helmets pop off.

Masks are buffed-up versions of normal soldiers, with metal masks on their faces to protect them from headshots. They also pack shotguns, which will let them do an extreme amount of damage when they get close to you, and a buffed-up amount of body armor.

The Masks can be killed either with body shots or headshots, but will take some...convincing before they die.

If you manage to hit a Mask in the head from behind, they can still be vulnerable to headshots, since the mask doesn't wrap all the way around. Alternately, if you manage to land two or three headshots from the front, you'll knock the mask off, allowing you to finish off the enemy with one more shot to the head. If you have to take them down the old-fashioned way, you can just unload on their chest area. They'll eventually get knocked down, then staggar back up, but if you keep firing at them, they'll go down eventually. A grenade at the feet of a mask-wearing enemy will be an instant kill.

The Riot Shield wielding foes are the ones you really need to watch out for. These guys pack either Magnums or SMGs, but are more dangerous because of their defensive capabilities than due to their offensive prowess. Their riot shields will usually protect them from almost all damage, but there are ways to get around them, if you know what you're doing.

To be specific, there are actually two kinds of riot shield foes. One will approach with a small, clear shield that can apparently be fractured and eventually destroyed by gunfire, while the other one will use a metal shield that cannot be destroyed. Regardless, the only way you can really kill these guys is to bypass the shield and attack their bodies or heads. (They do have helmets that will allow them to take a bunch of damage up top, however.) The easiest way to do this is to throw a grenade behind them and shoot it. If you throw a grenade in front of a shield-wielding opponent, they'll put their shield down and it won't do any damage whatsoever.

Know Your Weapons

One of the odd properties of the weapons in Black is the way they deal with accuracy and range. For most weapons, the first shot of a burst will be perfectly accurate, landing precisely where you aim your crosshairs. Even if you're a good distance from your opponent, firing off one snap round at their head will usually result in a kill. As in most other games, though, holding down the fire button will cause your shots to both pull upwards (recoil effects) and become less accurate, relative to the position of your crosshairs (spread). Thus, when dealing with enemies at a distance, you'll want to restrict yourself to either single shots to the head, or short, three or four-round bursts.

What's more curious is that most of the weapons in Black actually have a maximum range, beyond which their bullets actually disappear. This is mostly an issue with extremely long distances, on maps such as the dockyard or the bridge, but if you attempt to use an M16 or an AK-47 to snipe away at someone extremely far away, you'll notice that they won't take any damage and you won't be able to see where the bullet hit. Again, after it passes a certain distance, it'll just disappear. Some weapons, like the MAC-10 or the shotguns, will have a much smaller range than other weapons, while others, like the sniper rifle, can apparently fire as far as you can see.

No-Blur Reload

If you hate the blur effect that pops up when you reload a weapon, simply hit the reload button, cancel it with a melee attack, then hit reload again. This will allow you to reload without blurring your vision, but it will take slightly longer than a normal reload.