There's a growing consensus in the video gaming community that there are too many shooters, that in recent years the smell of potential lucre has turned otherwise inventive game studios into assembly lines for generic super soldiers with bog-standard weapon load-outs. It's not an idea we wholly subscribe to, but we'd agree that if you're going to develop a new shooter IP, you should hinge the game on an idea that distinguishes it from the bland morass that gamers are forced to wade through to find a rare diamond in the rough. Dumping a skip-load of cash on hyping the game prior to launch is only going backfire if the “bleeding edge of advanced warfare” turns out to be utterly anemic.

Cool gun

For 1200 Microsoft Points, Blacklight Tango Down provides an Unreal Engine 3-driven shooter experience for less than a third of the cost of a new retail shooter release. That's about as far as the truth of Ignition's marketing campaign goes, the shooter that you get for just over a tenner is fairly light on content, pretty generic, wonky in places and employs a few multiplayer faux-pas that developers ground out of the genre years ago for good reason.

It's set in a dystopic, war-torn Soviet near future with you as the pointed end of a military organisation called Blacklight: not that you'd know this, of course, because none of it is explained to you unless you wade through several pages of text on the title screen. The control system and most of the game mechanics are cut and pasted from an unimaginative template and slapped into the same document, so in the unlikely event you haven't had much FPS experience on the 360, you'll need to do a little homework first.

Four solo-able co-operative missions form the base of BLTD, where you can hone your Blacklight skills against AI enemies that pop in and out of cover and slide sideways across corridor shooting sequences like scripted sprites from Operation Wolf. The way these opponents move and react we're not even sure there is any AI to speak of here, at least in the modern perception of the term: they make no effort to advance on your position, freeze on the spot while you're out of a whatever range it takes for you to trigger them off and continue to empty their Hollywood magazine-equipped assault rifles onto your position as if pinning you down until you starved to death was an option.

Call of Budget: Modern Waster

Multiplayer circumvents that problem of course, and with seven different modes you need never try the Black Ops co-operative missions. But replacing AI with human players comes with its own problems, and due to some terrible map-making decisions on the part of Zombie Studios, players are bottlenecked into performing predictable actions. Fixed spawn points mean spawn-camping is prolific in team games with several maps sporting spawn-points down dead-end corridors where a cyanide pill would be more useful than your primary weapon.

Blacklight features a “Hyper-Reality Visor” that highlights ammo dumps and hostiles on your vision, but you can't shoot while using it and if you are unfortunate enough to pop up in one of the aforementioned spawn points of doom, then you've already got a pretty clear idea of where death is likely to come from next anyway.

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