First Impressions: Blacklight: Retribution

I got this game for the PS4 a couple of days ago on a whim because I was bored and it was free. While it was downloading I watched a few streams on the PlayStation service and was instantly reminded of Left for Dead and Call of Duty. This piqued my interest as I had been wanting to play a decent shooter on the PS4 for a while now (I'm just not that good at PC games), so I jumped in.
I went on to the practice mode (no tutorial) and played a round of Team Deathmatch. I instantly loved it. The graphics are awesome, the recoil isn't massive, the gameplay, while slightly generic, (what isn't nowadays?) was fun and best of all, I found myself actually being able to hold my own against other players. Of course the enemies were bots, so I quick joined a game and after finally figuring out that the game was Deathmatch (not team), I found to my surprise that I was averaging top-mid in the score table. Firstly I thought it was my 'skills' but I soon found out it was other elements to the game.

The HRV is the big element in the game and it allows you to temporarily see through walls and all your enemies are highlighted in orange. This is brilliant because it gets rid of one of the great menaces of FPS's. Campers. Now that you can see everyone, as long as you remember to turn your HRV on, no-one is safe. Unless they are behind you of course.

The second element was the guns. The generic assault rifle is your first weapon and it has great power and little recoil (compared to a game like Counter-Strike). You can unlock others by either purchasing them with money on the market (either with in-game money for a duration (and sometimes permanently) or for actual money permanently), or purchasing them in the depot when they are unlocked throughout a match. Here, you can unlock anything from flamethrowers to hardsuits and all guns seem to be pretty well balanced.

Another thing that you can do with your equipment is customize it. There are so many customization options for everything that it seems too good to be true. And it sort of is. I don't know if this changes the more you level up but buying an upgrade and then seeing it disappear after a day or two doesn't seem like a great deal. There are some you can buy permanently but only for either extortionate amounts of in-game cash or for real money.

This combined with a few bugs (falling through the floors) and latency issues have soured my experience with the game a bit but with a host of new modes and maps still to try, (as well as new updates) I know I will be having fun with this game for quite a while longer.

Thanks for reading, Satamer