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You’re in the Army (Rangers) now

Black Hawk Down, both the book by Mark Bowden and Ridley Scott's film adaptation, is a cautionary tale about the power of the modern military, about what it can and cannot do. It is a requiem for yet another loss of innocence for the United States. It is about the honor and courage of elite soldiers. It is about hubris and mistakes and heroism. It is a chronicle of the terrible debacle that came of our efforts to stop General Mohamed Farrah Aidid, who was interfering with shipments of food to the starving people of Somalia. It is a classic of military literature and a great war movie. Black Hawk Down, the game by Novalogic, is none of these things. It is, however, a grand shoot-'em-up action-oriented first person shooter in the tradition of Medal of Honor.

Can I fly?

Local sights

This van is a fixer upper

’Do we get to win this time, sir?’

In some ways, Black Hawk Down is a horrible misuse of the source material. There's nothing in here about the moral complexity of using sophisticated hardware to mow down mobs of poorly armed local militiamen. Although many of the single player missions include civilians, there's little disincentive to check your targets before firing. Completely contrary to the point of Black Hawk Down, there's no sense of attachment to your teammates, much less any sense of being part of a squad of highly-trained soldiers. And the military ethic of leaving no one behind, which is what led to the Battle of Mogadishu in 1993, is nowhere to be seen here. The manual does a good job of paying its respects to the men who fought in Somalia, but there's no sign of this solemnity in the actual game, which is more Rambo than commando. It ends with you being sent to single-handedly assassinate General Aidid three years after US forces have been withdrawn (Aidid died of a heart attack in 1996 and the game supposes the putative heart attack was actually a Delta Force assassination).

You shoot, we stand here

We're here to distract you

You've got a flat

In these regards, and considering this game was released the day the US began the war against Iraq, Black Hawk Down is an embarrassing convergence of poor choices and bad timing. If ever there was a game whose release should have been delayed, this was it. If the game industry wants to be treated with the same respect as the rest of the entertainment industry, it needs to learn to be more sensitive and behave more responsibly. This sort of gung-ho, gun-'em-all-down stuff plays in Medal of Honor with the passing of sixty years. It doesn't play in Black Hawk Down with the passing of only ten years, especially at a time when members of the 10th Mountain Division, the Army Rangers, and Delta Force are fighting and dying. Shame on you, Novalogic.