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For weeks now I've wrestled with two reviews: Blacklight: Tango Down and Castlevania: Harmony of Despair. The unfortunate common factor between these otherwise divergent titles is their dedication to multiplayer. In a world dominated by online support and branching multiplayer, two download-only games can hardly stand to compete against the better-funded, better-realized disc-based competition.
Neither game is bad, but they both suffer from their aspirations. Let's look at Castlevania first. The Castlevania series hinges on skill and determination from the earliest days of sluggish 8-bit sprites to the smooth and delicate motions of Shannoa in Order of Ecclesia. Harmony of Despair definitely has that skill-based motivation, but it completely forsakes a challenging single-player experience in favor of a brutally difficult multiplayer one.
Getting through even the second stage of this game requires online cooperation. I played through a substantial portion on my own, but eventually had to give in. No amount of money-collecting and inventory management would push me past the relentless barrage of beefed-up bosses that I knew how to defeat.
I'm not an online multiplayer enthusiast, and I likely never will be. I don't like depending on others to get me through situations when I know perfectly well that I have all the skill required to do it myself. Characters in Harmony of Despair feel handicapped by this push for playing with friends, and that taints what I thought was ultimately a very cool design move.
I loved running through sprawling open maps of castles I remembered, and encountering old bosses that were fiendish in their original games. Harmony of Despair could be truly amazing if the emphasis wasn't on multiplayer. Days after launch it was next to impossible to find someone online to play with, and the sad fact is that most download-only games don't retain much of a following. Especially not on a console known for its shooters.
Which leads me to Blacklight: Tango Down. This game is gorgeous. That floored me when my fingers first danced over a keyboard at E3 -- Blacklight was the first game I played there. The crisp and labyrinthian levels sucked me in so much that I didn't notice the cackling player beside me repeatedly shooting me in the face. The feel was right, and in that moment I wanted something spectacular to happen with it.
The lack of single-player ingenuity was disappointing. Blacklight is pretty, and the gun customization is satisfyingly detailed, but who's playing it? Where Harmony of Despair had a loyal Castlevania fanbase to call on, Blacklight speaks to a completely different audience. An audience currently staring shiny-eyed at every piece of Halo: Reach information that comes their way. Granted, Blacklight launched during the doldrums of summer gaming, but shooter fans don't get bored with their favorite titles easily.
Blacklight is also on PC, but the competition faced by a new game is even tougher there, with the likes of Team Fortress 2 and Counter-Strike still engrossing players years and years after their initial release.
I wanted to like these games. I fought with myself from the moment I played them to the moment I started writing this article. But if multiplayer is a game's focus, it has to be pretty incredible to compete with the likes of Halo, Modern Warfare 2, etc. Blacklight and Harmony of Despair are far from bad, but no amount of good press I give them can sway an already heavily divided multiplayer audience.
