Blacklight: Tango Down Review

It’s obvious to see where the inspiration for Blacklight: Tango Down comes from. An online, XP based FPS that sees you taking down other players at high speed in tight arenas has to give at least a little credit to Call of Duty. Every enemy you take down cues one of those welcome experience indicators to pop up, retaining the feeling anyone who has experienced Activision’s game online will attest to as a great way to feel. Blacklight: Tango Down strives to be a worthy alternative to COD though, but does this downloadable title do what most retail games fail to?

It makes sense to start with the aspects of Tango Down that are significantly different to COD, most prominent of all being the ‘glitchy’ art style that surrounds every element of the game. Rather than go for a conventional shooter aesthetic, the developers have tried to give everything in Blacklight a gritty, fuzzy effect, sort of a cross between an untuned TV and computer error screens. This is one of the central themes running throughout the game, even going so far as to include flash grenades which mess up foes’ screens as if they are experiencing a glitch. On paper this effect sounds great, but sadly in practice the effect is more damning to the technical side of the game itself.

The game is extremely fast paced, which is where your future proof armour comes in handy

Whether the crossover from style to tech was intentional or not, the frame rate issues here are even more prominent thanks to the extra ‘blemishes’ the game has anyway. That said, even without the glitchy aesthetic, I haven’t played an online shooter as laggy or as plagued with frame rate drops since the PS3 version of Team Fortress 2, it really can become choppy to play.



The technical problems don’t stop with the graphics either. As an online only game, you need to be signed into PSN even if you want to play the single player Black Ops missions, you would think that finding online games would be a breeze. This is not the case, and more often than not you’ll be waiting a while on the search screen in order to find any other players to go up against. Once in a game, being kicked from it is just about as likely as it is in other online shooters, but the wait time before said games is definitely above average.

You can work as a team in Black Ops missions or take them on Solo

Despite all of this, I did enjoy my time playing Blacklight: Tango Down. The game does a good job of replicating the success of COD in both the levelling based customisation and the control sense, the latter making for an extremely accessible game. The rewards for earning XP are balanced in new player’s favour, so as to encourage newcomers to keep at it, essential due to the smaller amount of people who are actively playing the game. Tango Down can be genuinely enjoyable at times, the basic set up making for the best FPS action you can find on the PSN.

As enjoyable as Blacklight: Tango Down can be, more often than not the game struggles under its own limitations; it’s near unplayable when frame rate drops kick in. It’s a missed opportunity, as at this price, Tango Down should be a PSN classic. The technical issues prevent this from being the case, even though I would recommend Blacklight: Tango Down as a cheap downloadable alternative to COD: Black Ops to those who have already grown tired of Activision’s game.