We all know Wolfire Games, yes? Indie game dev company, created such brilliant digital experiences such as Receiver and Overgrowth? Well. They have made quite a few games (relatively), one of which being this beautiful old-ish game, Black Shades.
In Black Shades, you play as a body guard (or something with roughly the same job description) with some slick black shades, attempting to protect a dapper fellow in full white garments. Basically, people run around with pistols, shotguns, snipers, knives, and more and try to kill this particular fellow. Your job is to STOP that from happening! Gameplay takes place in a randomly (?), infinitely generated city, in various kinds of weather, among civilians, assassins, and (sometimes) zombies. The player is, in each level, given one particular weapon-- a type of pistol, a machine gun, a grenade, etc.... One of those, among a number of others. You can melee, shoot/stab/lob grenades, and tackle. OH! And slow down time. There's also a curious super-sight-type element, though frankly I simply don't use it much. Maybe I'm not competent (I'm not), but it's worth mentioning, given this is a review.
Now, REVIEWING: the fact that, for computers, the game is free makes it certainly worth getting. It's a small file, and provides plenty of fun. A classy, quick little singleplayer FPS, with a unique feel and set of skills for the player's character. They ARE somewhat broken in one fashion of another, varying with platform-- for example, in the Windows version, tackling throws off the character's rotation immensely, making that form of attack essentially void. As I said, the vision thing doesn't operate very conveniently, though frankly I haven't played with it much and thus am not quite suited to talk about it. It DOES look nice. The game's slow-motion is awesome, but that is to be expected with Wolfire; they seem to have perfected it, along with most everything else. Again, it's an old game. Another thing: if your Mac lacks PowerPC support (newer OSs no longer feature this), then this game's mac version simply won't work for you. That said, just use Wine or something; it's not exactly a performance-intensive game, so using DirectX emulators, etc. won't ruin the experience.
About that: the game's graphics are basic. Flat diffuse shading, no shadows. However, these aren't, of course, necessary to make a good game; the use of mist/atmospherics plus rain/snow effects mean atmosphere is most DEFINITELY achieved. Ragdolls are also a thing. A fun thing.
*ALSO! Doesn't seem to be on Linux.
Site: http://www.wolfire.com/black-shades
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