Blackwater

Blackwater is an ambitious project. The developers at Zombie Studios have tried to render the controller obsolete in first person shooters. The ambition was to give the player an authentic experience of what it is like to be an elite operate through Kinect, but unfortunately things didn't go as planned.

It's unfortunate, but as soon as you gain control over one of these elite soldiers the limitations of the experience are quickly made apparent. You cannot move around freely. You can duck down into cover, move from side to side and shoot, but that's pretty much it. In the heat of the battle you are always placed safely behind cover from where you can pick off the enemies one by one.

Once these enemies have been dealt with, your soldier automatically moves to the next spot. During these transport sections the developers have added a few neat little tricks for the player to perform. This includes kicking down doors are jumping through windows. Nice additions, but it soon dawns on us that this is the only variation the game offers, and that's disappointing. The basic cover and shooting mechanics quickly grow old and repetitious.

The controls in Blackwater are simple. You bend your knees to dive into cover, you lean left or right to peek out of cover and point your arm towards the target in order to shoot. You can reload your ammunition by pointing off screen, or bend your shooting arm and hit your elbow with the other hand to achieve the same thing.

All of this works remarkably well, but the lack of options is disappointing. You can also opt to play the game with a regular controller, but that ruins the whole experience. This is a game that has been created from the ground up for Kinect.

There is not much to say about the campaign. You take the role as a commander of the squad of elite soldier sent out on a bunch of missions. All members of the squad have their own specialities. One is an expert marksman and uses the sniper rifle, while another member of the squad uses a shotgun. Your not really given any choices, however, as the game automatically selects which soldier you use for any given situation.

There are alternative routes in each of the levels, and in theory these would add some level of strategy to the game. However, as the winning strategy always seems to be to try and get to higher ground, there isn't much thinking involved. The dialogue and story are, unsurprisingly, incredibly thin. Ill conceived puns ("Look, I'm riding shotgun with a shotgun!") are common place, and the story does nothing to immerse the player into the experience.

It's hard to enjoy Blackwater, even if the ambitious were there to begin with. It takes bold new ideas to revolutionise the shooter genre, but an on rails shooter for Kinect just doesn't do it. While it says on the back of the box that the game makes use of 40 different Kinect gestures, in reality there are very few moves to perform. It's a shame given that the controls actually work well enough. As it turns out Blackwater is just a poor game undone by it's repetitive nature, poor campaign and flat dialogue.