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Military intelligence [sic]

But these missions do accomplish what they set out to do: namely, dropping you into heated gunfights with bullets whizzing around your ears and lots of people shooting at each other. You have friendly teammates on most missions, but they behave accordingly to a very limited set of orders and some dubious AI. My favorite "where were you trained, soldier?" moment occurred after someone told me to use a grenade to blow a door, only to stand there and watch the grenade after I dropped it. That's right, Einstein, it's going to explode and you're going with it. Of course, considering the enemy AI is even more dubious, it's in your best interest to not put a lot of thought into it. Just approach everything as a wild Somalia-colored shooting gallery, complete with stray crocodiles and a few dungeon crawls through enemy bunkers.

Temporary carnage

Weren't you in Half-Life?

Dance of death

Each mission allows only a limited number of saves, which serves to heighten tension without straying too far into the realm of frustration. There are some instances of having to memorize insta-death traps, such as RPG launchers on rooftops or oddly placed .50 caliber machine gun nests covering tight corners in bunkers. Good work using all that firepower to cover a ten foot corridor. You'll also have to power through some gameplay that's essentially set on rails, but most of these are forgiving and mercifully brief.

Reporting for online duty

At any rate, the saving grace of the single player game is that it's fairly short and serves as an appetizer before digging into Black Hawk Down's real long-term appeal: multiplayer. Novalogic's Novaworld technology provides solid netcode for surprisingly lag tolerant connections. Unfortunately, their ingame browser is a pain to navigate, taking forever and a day to query the available servers. Then it gives you plenty of opportunities to accidentally back out and have to query them all again. When you join a server that's filled up, it puts you in line to join rather than telling you it's full. The Novaworld browser wants to teach you patience.

Bunker bunks

Killing Aidid

Property values gone to hell

Although you can play Black Hawk Down as a deathmatch game, it fares much better with one of its many team-based modes. Team king of the hill is a wild and frantic way to concentrate a lot of firepower in one place. The capture the flag game, on the other hand, usually spreads the action out. Each team has a base and up to a dozen scattered flags. You job is to gather your enemy's flags and bring them back to your base while preventing the other guys from gathering your flags. There are also objective-based maps where you have to use satchel charges to destroy the other team's gun emplacements. Many maps have forward spawn points that can be captured so you'll respawn closer to your objectives and get back into the fighting faster.