NeonNight - Blacklight Retribution Review

   Blacklight Retribution is an MMOFPS created by Zombie Studios, and hosted by Perfect World. It's a futuristic shooter, complete with neon lights and mech suits. If you're cool with staring at multiple shades of black for a majority of the time you're playing, then this is the game for you. There's some also some orange in there, don't worry.

   I had been waiting on Blacklight Retribution to come out for a long time. Frankly, I'm a little disappointed...



   Before I get to that, though, let's focus on what the game did RIGHT... First off, there's the customization aspect.

If I were a lesser person, I might have been confused.

   Unlike other games, you don't pick between a selection of ready-made guns. Instead, you switch out different parts of your gun until it becomes a completely different gun. Most of this is in the Receiver portion of the gun, but enough part changes for any given receiver can make your gun perform radically different. Of course, along with the important parts of the gun, you can also slap a little keychain (weapon tag) on there, and give it a paint job (camo). Your character's appearance, and even his pistol, is also customizable, but not to the same degree the primary guns are.

   As of the time I'm writing this, you can get almost everything in the game with in-game currency, with cash being reserved for cosmetic things, and unlocking things early. However, the prices for everything you see will be for using the item for 1 day. You CAN buy things permanently (yay!), but it will be much more expensive. I'd estimate about 20 times as expensive than buying it for a single day. Better than wasting money buying the same thing over and over again for a month, though.

  I had played the game for the first time about a week ago, and noticed a lot of bugs. Less than a week later, at least a few of those bugs have been taken care of, so you can rest easy knowing that the people who manage the game are listening to you, and the game seems to be in good hands.

  Lastly, pressing V let's you see through walls at the penalty of not being able to do anything while you're doing it. It's handy, and stops the game from becoming stale. "I can't find anyone" is not a valid complaint for this game.

I feel like a future-soldier already.

   Now for the WRONG. Just playing through a few matches, certain things ticked me off very fast. The most noticeable being melee weapons and shotguns. See, the game has an upgrade system outside of it's weapon customization system.

Now I will have an extra 1% edge in battle! TO VICTORY!

   If you put the right stuff together, you can get some great buffs. Namely, people rushing around with high speed instantly killing people with melee weapons. And winning. Only slightly more annoying that the guy who just blasts everyone with a shotgun for an instant kill. 

  My point, is that the game takes very little skill to play. You can do well with the assault rifle you start with by just rushing up on people and holding the left mouse button down until you get a lucky headshot. If you're doing well, you can call in a Hardsuit to help you in battle, which is basically a battlemech, only you pilot it yourself. It comes equipped with a gatling gun and a railgun, that you can fire simultaneously, along with a very large amount of armor. Similar to "killstreaks" in Call of Duty, this often just adds insult to injury as the losing team just ends up getting destroyed harder.

A hardsuit. Big target, but when it kills instantly, who cares?

   Overall, the game is nice and doesn't really have anything missing from the experience except maybe a single-player mode. It has all the essentials (Team Deathmatch, Capture the Flag), and a very unique style. One of my personal favorites being error grenades (I don't know their actual names). This game's version of a smoke grenade and a flash grenade are a grenade that creates a cloud of errors and a grenade that causes you to bluescreen for a few seconds.

   If you want to play a generic FPS that isn't about shooting non-Americans with assault rifles, then you should check this out. Gives you some of the experience of modern shooting games without any of the cost.

   4 out of 5

   In terms of free MMOFPS games, this is the best I've played. If you know of a better one, don't hesitate to tell me about it!

   Edit: Some people had a problem with me saying the game takes no skill, especially since I was only level 5 when I wrote the review. At the time of writing this edit, I'm level 21, I've tried out many more of the weapons, and my opinion hasn't changed one bit. Go figure.