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Black continues to offer more of the same. After the first few levels, however, the difficulty jumped up quite a bit. I went from mowing down small groups of enemies to being caught in wicked crossfire situations, surrounded by scores of baddies firing from all angles.
I have noticed that the AI is pretty stupid, but I think I know the reason for this. FPS on console is hard to pull off, Halo being the greatest success story. This game is setup like an FPS on PC. The targetting reticle is tiny and headshots are hard to aim accurrately with the controller. If the AI were more intelligent or the enemies more mobile, it would probably be near impossible to get the necessary headshots to dispatch enemies efficiently enough to advance.
I also have a problem with the checkpoint system. There is no quick-save, so you must rely on checkpoints. Unfortunately, these are neither frequent nor permanent. That is, you may have a huge mission with numerous fights, but only have one or two checkpoints through the level. This makes dying a very punishing event. It also means that death is a much greater time commitment, since accomplishing a single level can take me over an hour, moving slowly, checking for all the secondary objectives, hidden weapons, etc... On top of the checkpoints being sparse, they are also temporary. If you quit and come back later, you have to restart the entire level, yet another huge time commitment.
Despite these complaints, I still do not think that Black is a bad game. However, the punishing time commitment for dying really takes its toll when I only have a few hours per day to play. Failing to advance the game much on account of dying and then not being able to save what progress I do make is really starting to get on my nerves.
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