Blacklight: Retribution

Hello there, today I am going to review a game I have been playing on and off for the past few days, it's a free-to-play First Person Shooter named Blacklight: Retribution That's currently on open beta.

Before you start playing you should take a look at the game menu, even though it seems pretty straight forward it's not. Some menus are redundant while others are just not intuitive so I will try to explain in more detail during the review.

Let us start with the marketplace, obviously it's where you buy stuff such as gear, weapons and weapon parts(more on it later) however you can do the exact same thing from the customization menu, making it redundant since you have 2 ways of achieving the same thing with one slight difference. In the customization menu it will show how the item will affect your total stats while in the marketplace it will only show the item stats.

One thing I found confusing is the way the stats are shown in both the Customization and the marketplace. In the marketplace an item will show +10 recoil indicating that your weapon will have less kickback when shooting while in the customization it will actually reduce recoil by 10.

The customization menu is where you will change your gear and weapons. Gear-wise you have 3 slots which you can combine to your liking, some have more HP, other faster run speed or even faster energy gain for the VR. You also have a range of utility slots which depends on the armor you have, in these slots you can put items such as mines, grenades, visual-scramblers, etc. As for the weapons this is the greatest part of the game as you can tweak each to suit your playstyle:

• reload faster or carry more bullets per mag?
• closed scope with a big zoom or just a sight that aims faster?
• Stock that helps you control your recoil a bit better you one that increases the precision of each shot?
• a silencer or a longer barrel that increases your effective range?

...you choose.

Blacklight gameplay feels very similar to Battlefield as you sprint around from cover to cover in moderately large map, players as they level up will unlock backpacks which will let them fulfill certain roles in a team such as medic, dropping supplies or fixing the robots.

A particular unique feature of this game is the VR, yes it is Virtual Reality. VR allows players to enhance their vision to locate friendlies, enemies and other points of interest such as mines and weak-spots in the Robots Heavy-Armor. While using the VR you can not attack and it only works for a few seconds after which you have to wait for your energy to replenish, plus there are devices that counter the VR by cloaking nearby players from the VR or creating a dummy that will show in the VR.

HVR in action

There are 4 game modes, Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, Domination and King of the Hill. While DM and TDM are self explanatory in DOM you have three fixed locations where you must Hack/Capture a device and keep it as long as you can to gain points overtime first team to get 1000 wins. KOTH consists on capturing a randomly activated location by standing near it for some time, first team to get 4 points wins the match.

One thing I find disappointing in the game is the lack of strategy, sure we wouldn't expect any strategy in a Deathmatch but the same seems to apply to all other modes, since the respawn locations are not fixed its not uncommon to get killed from behind when 5 sec ago there was no one there. This gives the maps a feel that regardless of the modes they are just a big arena.

Overall the game has interesting concepts and I believe it is worthy enough for you guys to give it a try, specially if you enjoy playing FPS just to kill time... or other players.