When I first heard about Deep Black: Reloaded, I looked at the trailer and thought to myself, "Hey, this looks like a great mix of game styles!” Honestly, I think the trailer ended up raising the expectations a little too high. I really wanted to like this game and worked hard to give it a fighting chance and explore the value of it. But, I think it falls short in just about every category.

There is a somewhat unique story in Deep Black: Reloaded, but it feels kind of like a mostly underwater Frontlines: Fuels of War mixed into a 3rd person shooter (but Frontlines was much better). With the current expectation in this generation of games, I’d stick with the demo on this. If you like the demo, you may like the game. Unfortunately, the demo is basically all the game has to offer, the game just takes longer.

When it comes to hardware, Deep Black: Reloaded should play on most PCs with decent hardware. This isn’t a terribly demanding game and I didn’t find it taxing my system too much. The graphics in this game are overall fairly decent, some good particle effects and decent scenery. However, the overall game mechanics let these highlights suffer from underuse and fall short of their potential. Even the work they put into the graphics falls short in that gray is the palette of choice. There is definitely an industrial feel to the game, which may have been their goal. Unfortunately, it really doesn’t do much for those looking to be visually stimulated. I’ll include here the sound for the game since it falls under the same shortcomings; disappointing, to say the least. There are odd comments and sub-par voice acting. The whole game is voice-acted, but at quality you were used to seeing in older 2004-2006 era games. There just doesn’t seem to be a lot of variety anywhere really.

The Deep Black: Reloaded single player campaign tosses you pretty much right into the thick of things. There is the option for a brief ’tutorial’ which gives you a very quick overview of basic game mechanics. Shoot a gun, use your grappling hook to open a door, walk around, swim, reprogram an underwater bot... done. The campaign is a decent length, but it feels a lot longer in that it is VERY repetitive. The environments are repetitive. The enemies are repetitive, and short on variety. The whole game feels basically like moving from one area to another, finding conveniently placed cover, and playing "shoot-a-mole" as the enemies pop their heads up on cue to exchange fire with you.