Black Squad is a free to play first person shooter that was developed by VALOFE and NS STUDIOS and published by VALOFE.
Black Squad was released to the Steam platform on the 26th of June 2019.
Every piece of media used in this article was captured by me on the 13th of June 2021 except another source is given.
INTRODUCTION
In essence, Black Squad is a rather generic free to play first person shooter that does nothing necessarily special or innovating, but the things that it does, it does very well and without too much bloat that is plaguing a lot of the other competitors on the market. In this review I want to shine a light on Black Squads gameplay, its game modes, the cash shop and some of the technical aspects of the game, just for you to know if it is worth your time and the 8 Gb of hard drive space that it needs.
GAMEPLAY
The gameplay can be described as a mixture of classic counter-strike with the addition of aiming through iron sights and scopes. There is also a mechanic where the character starts to sprint while holding a melee weapon.
The accuracy of the guns depends entirely of the state the player character is in, crouching is most accurate, while jumping the least, and aiming through the scope while crouched grants the highest accuracy possible.
One feature about Black Squads gunplay is the chamber mechanic. A gun can have a bullet in the chamber, so even if the magazine might be empty, the gun may still be able to shoot because of the chambered round. This is especially useful for sniper rifles that are often balanced out by needing a long time to reload. So the extra bullet can win you firefights. When the player spawns, the player can always reload because 1 bullet is missing from the magazine and is chambered, so to get a slight edge over the opponent, it is recommended to hit the reload key often, especially in game modes where you have a waiting time after the respawn, like Demolition.
Another quirk with Black Squad is, that every weapon can be equipped with a suppressor every time. So if there is a need of staying hidden during any point in the game, a suppressor can always be attached or detached. Guns also can not be equipped with different attachments, instead there are different variants of different weapons. Assault Rifles commonly have a variant with more rounds in the magazine and higher damage or accuracy, but come without a grenade launcher or a laser. Other variants will have less rounds in the magazine but might have a grenade launcher, a sight or a laser, which is supposed to balance out the variants. That actually works quite well and I see a lot of different variants used in a lot of matches and it comes down more to personal taste, rather than pure statistics what variant or gun is being used. The grenade launchers are also not overpowered, they rarely kill.
The maps in Black Squad are varied in style and every game mode has their own dedicated maps. The issue comes with the design of them. Team Deathmatch maps are all mirrored and the majority of them work with the three lane principle often seen in Call of Duty. A lot of the maps are also too small. After just a few rounds on each of them, you should know them in and out. Here it might help to bring in maps from the SupplyRaid game mode, since they are not mirrored, bigger and still varied in style. SupplyRaid plays like modified Team Deathmatch anyway. Speaking of game modes…
GAME MODES
Here are some noteworthy game modes that Black Squad features.
In SupplyRaid, both teams need to run from point to point where one supply cache spawns on the map that has to be destroyed and drops supplies that the teams have to pick up. When picking up such supplies, the player gains points. When a player from either team reaches the point limit, the team wins. Killed players also drop supplies that can be picked up and that refill the currently equipped guns magazine. Especially strange in this game mode is, that the guns can only carry 2 magazines in the beginning of the round and later on only 1 magazine. So you can’t shoot a lot and constantly have to watch out for your ammo count. When also reaching a certain point limit, the gun will randomly change to a stronger weapon, but the weapon is still random. So you can get screwed over really easily in a firefight when your SMG suddenly disappears and you stand in front of an enemy with sniper rifle, because the game said so. My least favourite game mode in Black Squad.
In Arms Race you will gain a new weapon when making a certain number of kills with the current one. The team in which a player gets 40 kills wins the round. There are a lot of melee weapons that a player has to go through to reach the kill goal, which is a nice take on this game mode. When the top player has 30 or more kills, the player will also be marked through all walls for the enemy team so it is even harder to win.
Demolition plays more like Call of Duty’s Search and Destroy game mode, where you can jump in with your already pre made loadouts instead of having to buy armor or weapons like in Counter-Strike. This mode works well, too.
Then there is also the mode of the day, which is a spin on an already existing mode, on the 13th of June 2021 the game has Team Deathmatch but only with pistols, which is also always listed as a seperate mode.
There is also a bot mode where players have to defend themselves and a position against incoming waves of AI, which gets stale really quickly and is not a lot of fun. The maps are also very uninspired in this mode. Players can earn additional points within a round to purchase certain gadgets to help defend against the bots.
Of course there are competetive matches that make you earn ranks and additional awards, depending on how far you can get in a season. Even competetive matches have a casual atmosphere which is extremely nice. The game mode played is Demolition.
GRAPHICS
For only taking up 8 Gigabytes of space on the hard drive, Black Squad is a good looking game. It obviously can’t keep up with new AAA titles from 2019, but it doesn’t has to be. It needs to be accessible, which it is. The graphics also aren’t very demanding, the graphics settings are as expected for a PC title, so people with a weaker computer can run the game easily. I also experienced no drops in the framerate.
The effects are especially good looking, and certain textures on guns are animated and the blood makes for good hit feedback. There are a few issues however, textures on the environment are low resolution, Pixels of the lightmaps are clearly visible when Realtime Lighting is disabled and maps can be very undetailed, and are in need of extra props to fill them out and make them look more busy.
There is also the option of disabling the bullet trails, which I will highly recommend you do. They won’t affect enemy bullet trails, so you can still see where enemies shoot from, and they will only disable yours. The reason why I would recommend turning them off is that they are simply too slow and do poorly represent where the bullets are actually going to. The hit effects on the walls or enemies are enough and do a much better job of showing where bullets go.
The blood effects can also be turned down for those that not like them. Hit feedback on enemies is still given via a hitmarker.
Gun models are also extremely detailed and non-generic, which makes it exciting to pick up a new gun and makes it stand out from other shooters.
SOUNDS
The sounds are really well made, guns sound loud and have great impact, medals for kills are really satisfying and generally, the game does sound as expected, with some added punch.
It is easy to hear enemy footsteps and gunfire, however the guns in the game all sound way too similar and it is hard to differentiate them from each other. Generally you can tell the type of gun, but not what gun specifically someone shoots.
A player can also call out little commands via a selection menu. It is no Tribes, but it doesn’t has to be. In game modes like SupplyRaid or Demolition however, it would be nice to have more specific options to set up certain tactics.
Music doesn’t play during gameplay, but the menu themes are okay. They are very generic however, and they could work just as well in a lot of other shooters.
TECHNICAL ASPECTS
As already written down earlier, the graphics are generally good looking, but there are some technical issues with them, and that is slow occlusion culling. Occlusion culling is a technique of hiding every object in camera view that the player can’t see, and they appear when the player is supposed to see them, but that process in Black Squad is somehow really slow, so you will constantly see some slight pop-in when walking around corners, and the environment is somewhat complex. The same happens to dead characters as well, for some reason I can’t explain.
The game also has other bugs, where the game doesn’t continue after a round ends and doesn’t drop the players into the post game screen, and the game has to be force closed with the task manager. That happened to me once in my 40 hours of play time.
Then there was also an instance where the game seems to have connected every player to a server too far away and kicked out 80% of the players due to high ping.
Another issue I encountered was that the game told me my login credentials were wrong, but I can not enter any because the game uses the Steam account to identify players, so it is impossible to enter wrong credentials. A restart solved this issue.
Of course it isn’t all bad, the game features a 32 and 64 bit client, so players with both types of operating systems can play the game.
The accessibility settings are quite nice, you can change your world field of view and weapon field of view, which is rarely seen. There is also a setting for the weapon position to put it on the left side of the screen. The crosshair options are also plenty.
CASH SHOP
An important aspect to shine a light on in free to play games is of course the cash shop. In Black Squad, fortunately, there is no pay to win. Every gun can be bought for money earned through gameplay, and a player can earn it really fast. A major problem is that if you want to get these weapons permanently, you have to pull them from a randomized loot box that holds al of these guns. Medals can be earned through accomplishing missions, and through those medals you can select weapons to buy permanently and you don’t have to rely on your luck. those weapons are rotated every few weeks however, so not every weapon is available here all the time.
If you like the game and want to drop some money, You can either buy a box that guarantees you certain weapons and items, or you can try your luck on randomized lootboxes and hope that you get a permanent weapon through there. I invested €20 and checked what i can get with that money. You can get some guns via beginner sets that you can buy for €10-€15, but if you want to get one of the special and new weapons or characters, you either open a ton of lootboxes, that might cost you well something between an estimated €75 – €150, of course depending on your luck, or you drop a cool €100 on a not random box that get you the weapon you want specifically, which is simply way too expensive just for a weapon skin with a fancy effect.
I purchased a non-random box to specifically get a set of guns and a nice weapons skin, plus some ingame currency to purchase further things with, which cost me €10.
Everything in the shop of course doesn’t have a fixed price on them, you do buy currency first, but i like to tell you specifically how much real world money you need to invest instead of some fake made up currency.
CLOSING THOUGHTS
Black Squad is a rather simple first person shooter with extremely solid gameplay that should work on the computers of a lot of people, and I can highly recommend it checking it out if you want a new free game to sink some time into. It is very casual, and that even carries over into the competetive matches, which have a rather relaxing atmosphere.
The complexity of the maps highly suffers however, and it might get repetetive after a while. But after 40 hours I still want to play the game and I have a lot of fun with it.
If you plan on making any purchases in the game, then be smart and don’t spend your money on the random lootboxes, rather simply buy the guns with earnable currency just by playing, and save your BS Coins until you have enough for a gun you like and it is in rotation.
The bugs mostly don’t affect your gameplay, but rather the things around it, and while they didn’t annoy me, they also can’t be overlooked.
I recommend Black Squad.
Additional Sources:
Featured Image: https://store.steampowered.com/app/550650/Black_Squad/ 13th of June, 2021, 5:40 pm