Blacklight: Retribution

In neaty mc neaterson news Perfect World Internationals free to play shooter Blacklight Retribution opened up servers in Australia, so I could check it out without teleporting around the map and dying constantly, hooray!

So what is it?

For anyone who hasn’t heard of the game yet, Blacklight: Retribution is a free to play cyberpunk/sci-fi shooter developed by Zombie and published by Perfect World. It’s the sequel to the downloadable multiplayer title Blacklight: Tango down. It feels a little bit like call of duty in neotokyo, combats pretty fast and aiming down the sights seems to work a lot better than firing from the hips.

Players can earn “CP” in a match, a currency used to unlock things from certian stations around the map such as flamethrowers, extra health or extra ammo and eventually mech’s called “Hard suits” which come with a railgun, lots of health and a generated weak point that enemy players can scan for using their Hyper Reality Visor.

The HRV in action

The good

• Finally has Australian servers

• Great production values – The assets look pretty nice
• A great sense of game feel

• Mech suits – Has to have its own point
• Tachicoma’s are commonly seen in levels – Also had to have its own point
• Huge level of customization for the avatar and weapons.

The bad

The cash shop feels like it could have been done a lot better and caused me to think about the lack of freedom that comes in a lot of free to play titles for users who don’t want to splash out $50 for features some shooter fans may consider a part of the games core. For example, in Blacklight players are provided with one free “loadout slot”. The loadout slots much like the name implies, its a slot where you chose a main weapon and a sidearm. However, you can’t, from my understanding change your loadouts in game. So in a match where I decided to go with a sniper rifle there’s little I can do if I wish to change to a different weapon during the match besides leaving the game or waiting for the intermission to swap my load out.

To avoid this you can purchase more load out slots and just switch your load out in game, the kicker however is that an extra load out slot will set you back 1000 zen a pop, which is roughly $10 in real world cash. I’m all for microtransactions and the free to play market, but you start to lose me when you begin to sell things that feel almost essential to being able to really enjoy the game. Perhaps if players had two or three stater load out slots and then could buy extra to really mix things up? But the ability to have slots for long and short range weapons feels like a given for a modern shooter.

Furthermore, $10 to establish a clan within the game seems pretty steep to me. I can understand the concept of pay walling a clan system so that only dedicated users can establish a clan but at the same time you can purchase the upcoming Counterstrike: Global Offensive for five dollars more and constantly change your clan name for free. Or play one of the many other online first person shooter titles that even provide clan stats for nothing.

All in all

Blacklight is a really neat game that appeals in so many ways to me, its neotokyo/ghost in the shell setting along with some really polished systems makes it stand out to a good deal of the other free to play shooters out on the market. With that said I don’t like some aspects of the cash shop and would have much rather pay the rough price a multiplayer shooter goes for in order to get the whole experience like with its predecessor Tango down, though this is still a large step up from that.

Hit me up in game: Hollowminds