Don't be fooled by the game's title, though, because Black Arrow is in no way an expansion pack. There have been quite a few graphical upgrades, including some pretty sweet looking lighting effects. A lot of the bugs from the previous game have also been fixed. There are also a ton of new multiplayer maps (14 by my count), and 10 new campaign levels for you and your friends to play through. While the emphasis of the game is still on the amazing online experience, the folks at Ubisoft didn't neglect the poor souls stuck with a dial-up connection. If you want to play the game with your friend, simply invite him over for some split-screen terrorist-killing action. There's also a brand-new storyline, with plenty of international intrigue, kidnapped scientists, and oil wars.
So what else is new, you say? Well, let's start by taking a look at some of the new features of the single-player experience. In the previous game, the single-player missions and campaigns seemed like an afterthought when compared to the multiplayer experience. Sure, you could lead your team into dangerous areas, commanding them to clear rooms or save hostages, but there was just something that felt a little too easy about it. The enemy A.I. was predictable, and, worst of all, it acted the same no matter how many times you played through a mission. Thankfully, the developers decided to make the enemies smarter, and the single-player game has become a lot more challenging, as well as a lot more fun.
Previously, if you walked into a room full of baddies, most of them would simply run for cover and fire at you from their entrenched positions. Now, it seems like every enemy has a different tactic. Some will run for cover, while others will try to sneak around and flank you and your men. This might not seem like much, until you consider that every time you start a new game or load a previous mission, all of the enemies in the level are randomly generated, each with a different type of A.I. than the previous time you played. So, if you enter a hallway and expect Enemy A to hide behind a barrel and shoot at you while Enemy B charges your men, since that's what they did the last time you went through, you'll be in for a rude awakening. Needless to say, I found this out the hard way, as I jumped around a corner expecting to see an enemy out in the open and was instead greeted by a hail of gunfire from behind a stack of crates.
It also appears that enemies have become more reliant on tear gas and grenades when your team is battling baddies from around a corner. I could only think of a few instances in the previous game when an enemy would lob a tear gas canister at my feet, but it happened a lot in Black Arrow, which was bad news for my men and I. There's nothing worse than accidentally running through a cloud of tear gas and bumping smack dab into a group of enemies. With my vision blurred and my teammates disoriented, it wasn't long before we were mowed down by the machinegun fire of our enemies.
