Black is a first-person shooter for the PS2 where you're a black ops specialist in the US military. It has pretty graphics and a reasonable physics engine, and you can break bits of the scenery by shooting at them. Sometimes. You know, like in every first-person shooter since Duke Nukem 3D.

So far, so generic. So why is it in the PS2 Platinum Collection? Why in God's name did it sell so well?

It can't be the gameplay: it's of the run run, hide hide, kill everything that moves variety that we've seen done better so many times. There isn't much variety in the adversaries you face, and once you've worked out the tactics for dealing with each type of enemy it's a case of rote repetition. The levels are quite difficult, even at the "normal" difficulty mode, so a certain amount of trying over is inevitable - and while there's only a stingy 8 levels, they're quite big and there aren't many save points in them, so replaying can take a while. Worse still, you can't save games on a long-term basis mid-level: if you want to turn off the PS2 and go do something else, all your progress in the level will be lost. Given how stingy they are with the mid-level checkpoints, I can't help but feel that this is especially lame.

It might be the "innovative" physics engine. Video game reviewers, and the more impressionable game players, are total suckers for innovation, even when it detracts from the game experience, because it's so very, very rare these days. However, I maintain that the physics engine and breaking machinery isn't that innovative - really, it's nothing that we haven't seen before in Half-Life 2, and you can't break as much of the scenery as the ad copy will have you believe. This is partially down to the structure of the levels: they are essentially linear, so the game can't allow you to, say, blow up a staircase which you have to go up to get to the end of the level.

Speaking of staircases, the game has an infuriating attitude to climbing and falling. Your character can't jump: that's fair enough, he's dragging around machine guns and hundreds of rounds of ammunition with him. But he is also selective about when he falls down - to wit, he will jump down a gap when the plot demands it, and won't when it doesn't. This leads to a couple of frustrating instances where it would make absolute tactical sense to jump down a gap to surprise some enemies (and, since the protagonist has made similar leaps earlier in the game, I know he can survive this one), but the game won't allow me. That's slightly sloppy.

In terms of weapons, there's nothing to write home about. There's some indistinguishable submachine guns and assault rifles. There's a really big machine gun. There's a powerful handgun and some crappy handguns. There's silenced versions of the handguns and assault rifles and submachine guns. There's a rocket launcher and a sniper rifle. Nothing fancy.

Finishing the game did give me some small sense of achievement, but that was immediately undermined by the end video: a brief thing, short and not especially fancy, nigh-identical to the mission briefing videos, in which the main character is informed that the arms dealer/terrorist-for-hire he thought he killed is, in fact, alive, but Uncle Sam wants to recruit me to assassinate him for real this time. And frankly, fuck that. I finish your game, you cheap bastards, and you give me a "sorry Mario, but the Princess is in another sequel" and a crappy end movie? Where's the reward in that?

This whole game feels like a teaser for a much better game on the PS3. Perhaps I'll enjoy Black 2, but for me Black 1 is, while a fun enough shooter, nothing to celebrate or come back to.