Ok, we need to talk about conveyance.
Conveyance is one of the most important aspects of game design. period. People who actually know something about game design will be angry with a game developer who doesn't incorporate it into their games; and people who aren't familiar with game design will be angry as well, even if they don't know exactly why.
If you don't know what conveyance is, you should watch Egoraptor's Sequelitis on Megaman. He explains it much better than I ever could. I'll provide a link below. Basically, conveyance is how well you teach the player how to play your game. Some games do this with button tutorials (which I loathe), but really well designed games will be able to teach the player through the mechanics alone. Usually, conveyance refers to teaching players how to use the controls they already know in order to progress through the game. In games with bad conveyance, however, it can sometimes be difficult to even learn which buttons you are supposed to press
And herein lies the most basic problem with BlackHole.
See, if you're dealing with a controller, there are usually a maximum of 10 buttons that you have to work with. Because of this, it's acceptable for controller-oriented games to not explain which buttons do what, because the player can just press all the buttons and learn for themselves in a matter of seconds. This is more rewarding to the player than is having his or her hand held through a button tutorial.
Then again, if you're dealing with a computer, there are often more than 100 buttons that the player has to work with. Most PC games stick with a generally accepted button layout so as not to confuse the players. WASD to move, mouse to aim, click for action. BlackHole keeps to this formula for the most part, except WASD and the mouse both aim, leaving no feasible control for movement. In order to move forward, you have to press "r", and to move backward, you press "f".
Now why did I spend the last 5 paragraphs of this little analysis ranting about that? Because it took me like 15 minutes to figure out how to move forward! Granted, "r" and "f" are close to the WASD keys, so they should be among the first buttons the player presses for experimentation. However, unless you hold the keys down, the speed boost you gain from hitting them is negligible, which lead me to believe that the keys did nothing. I suppose that's why they put a speed counter on the HUD, so you can see that pressing "r" causes the value to shoot up a bit, but still; a "how to play" screen would have been appreciated in this case.
Other than that, BlackHole is actually a really entertaining game. There's no specific goal to accomplish, but there are a good variety of missions to select, all available from the start, leaving the player to decide which game mode he or she wants to play at all times. I like this in a game, personally.
The incentive for completing missions is that you get money, which you can spend on upgrades, which you will need if you want to stand a chance in some of the harder missions. This is a good system at its core, but the execution is a little sloppy in BlackHole because you can just keep playing an easy mission for 10 minutes and get enough money to upgrade your laser to its maximum potential, at which point there's very little that can touch you. Seriously, once you get the laser to the highest level even the enemy flagships go down easier than a fly in a hurricane.
In short, once you figure out the controls of BlackHole, it becomes a fun experience that's very reminiscent of the dogfights from Star Wars: Battlefront II. In fact, The graphics rival those of Battlefront II (at times...kind of) and the sound direction is, in my opinion, superior. That alone earns this game my seal of approval
Until next time, stay spacey.
Links
sequelitis: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8FpigqfcvlM
Wholly Black: https://www.digipen.edu/?id=1170&proj=549
