No cash? No problem. Blacklight: Retribution is here and boy is it good.

User Rating: 9 | Blacklight: Retribution PC
By zephrr86 | Review Date:
So I started playing FTP titles back around 2009. The first of these games were mostly Korean MMO's and they looked really bad and were often broken and needless to say not very fun. When Valve opened the floodgates (no pun intended) and set TF2 as FTP on Steam it became the greatest FTP shooter of all time. Now in 2012 we have a new contender in the land of FTPFPS (say that one 5 times fast) and Blacklight: Retribution does the genre a solid.

First thing you will no doubt notice is how gorgeous the game is. The Unreal 3 engine is being pushed to the max here. Honestly this game I have to say is one of the best Unreal 3 games in the engines long and illustrious career. The only downfalls are going to be some texture pop in's. They are most noticeable however at the start of the match and only randomly occur in mid game. This however has no real impact on the job Zombie Inc has done with the graphics.

Once in your first match you will also notice there is no mini map. When you press V however you are given roughly 3 seconds of seeing every enemy player and their location on the map. After using it, you will need to let it recharge. This is a tactical marvel. Not a gimmick but instead a very unique way to set about strategy in game. The first thing is it really destroys camping. You know that the other team knows where you are at any time they want to look. This played out very nicely in one of my first few games when I happened to spawn behind a group in TD. I was able to get the jump and see exactly where they were and earned 4 frags.

Now the only negatives I have for this game are going to be the navigation system and leveling bonuses. The nav is pretty unattractive and not very fun to navigate. It actually becomes pretty frustrating and instead of trying to find something I am looking for I just give up and enter another match. Once you find where your leveling bonuses are (they are mailed to you and you need to go to the right hand side of the screen to pull a tab out) you will find little 3 day packs of weapons. This is fine and dandy except I only hope that at milestone levels 10, 20, 30 etc, the game will give you permanent equipment.

At the end of the day I can say that BR is going to be taking over for Tribes Ascend as my shooter of choice atm. I really suggest if you have a passing interest in online shooters you check out Blacklight: Retribution

I mean it is free after all ;)

Other Helpful Reviews for Blacklight: Retribution

Load Comments (0)