It's "gun porn." You want awesome shooting action? You'll do no better. You want more than that? It'll disappoint.
While on the topic, people have used the Omaha Beach scene in Saving Private Ryan to test out their HDTVs and sub-woofers. To sum it up, Black's audiovisual presentation makes it the game to use on a plasma screen. The graphics, like everything else that Criterion Studios has ever done, are awesome, don't get me wrong. The bullets don't just hit the ground; they bounce off the ground, hit a wall or tree, etc. When you find the RPG (rocket-propelled grenade) later on in the first or third level, the rocket leaves behind a cloud of smoke that rivals Call of Duty 2 for the Xbox 360 (if you want to check that review out, go to my profile). It may not exactly be the same as CoD2, but it comes so close, that, like MGS3 before, it questions whether we need the next generation or not. I actually liked the sound design, the most overlooked aspect in ANY game, better than the graphics. Like Burnout before, they didn't need to make it authentic to the war on terror. They just grabbed a gun, fired each one, and used the ones they liked on the guns in the game. You may not remember the faces or names in the subpar story, but you will remember what a magnum, AK-47, or an RPG looks and sounds like once you play this game one time through. The graphics and audio are so great, that I quickly noticed some of the game's shortcomings.
The controls are rock-solid for Black, and I liked that you can only hold two weapons at a time, giving it a little bit of strategy added on like Halo 2's dual-wield feature. I didn't mind the lack of a jump button, a la Perfect Dark, but the slow speed and lack of a SPRINT button irritated me more than it should have. The AI is pretty good, but they could have done a little more to enhance the overall feel of the enemies. They can take cover so they can shoot you while they are trying to avoid your shots, but they still fall victim to the same routines that you find in a shooter, like shooting an AK-47 from afar and no one notices or silencing your shots to successfully blow up a barrel. There are multiple difficulty options, plus an unlockable Special Ops mode, a la Halo's Legendary mode, but they never differ from each other, like how in Halo 2 it turns into a completely different game. The game also suffers from two major issues: less than minimum game length and lack of multiplayer. While competitive multiplayer isn't needed to make a game, we could have seen a little more focus on a split-screen co-op mode than the lackluster story to make a much more appealing game. Another minor problem is that it is just a single-player experience: no destruction mode, no point gains, not even a slight comparison to Burnout Revenge's crash mode. It is just a single player game, nothing more.
Overall, I liked this game more than I should. The audiovisual presentation and innovative destruction combined with an awful story and only one game mode keep this from absolutely perfect to merely solid. The controls are finely tuned for any gamer, making this a shooter that can appeal to the mainstream instead of just the hardcore. All this put into one bullet-woven cover makes this "gun porn" in the truest sense of the meaning.