The game designers have opted to have your gun fire automatically when it hovers long enough over an enemy target. Kotaku Australia reviews the first-person-shooter Blackwater video game, out soon for Xbox Kinect and endorsed by founder Erik Prince:
This week was the first time we heard of publisher 505 Games’ Blackwater, an FPS that would cast you in the role of Blackwater Worldwide mercenaries.
The topic seemed thorny – the mercenary company, now renamed Xe Services, has been at the center of a multiple of controversies and the subject of highly critical Congressional hearings. Blackwater has been linked to the deaths of 17 Iraqi civilians, and the alcohol-fueled fatal shooting of a security guard in the employ of the country’s vice president. According to 505, the game was designed in consultation with former mercenary agents, and with Erik Prince, the founder and former head of the hot-button security contractor.
Blackwater is an on-rails shooter that has you alternating between the perspectives of four different mercenary soldiers, each with a certain specialization. In the portion of the game I experienced in the demo, I operated first as a commando, and later as a sniper. The game is a highly exaggerated, concentrated bit of Blackwater lore – it’s more Hollywood than Reuters. Set in North Africa, it concerns a high-tension conflict in which the Blackwater team must rescue a UN envoy that has been taken hostage by the operatives of a malicious warlord.
The coming months will tell how the world decides to regard Blackwater, when it arrives on the Xbox 360 supporting both Kinect and conventional gamepad-controls.
