Blacklight: Tango Down makes a strong first impression visually because it benefits from the use of Unreal Engine 3. (It is also the first downloadable shooter on the Xbox Live Marketplace to be built exclusively in UE3.) The character models look nice with their robust customization options and the detail on the guns is quite impressive. And as expected for any game built using UE3, the lighting is great, but all of the textures suffer from slow loading or pop-ins. The big hook for Blacklight's visual style is the implementation of a novel heads-up-display. The HUD mimics what it would be like inside the helmet of a future soldier and uses some neat tricks to accentuate the aspect to its fullest.
The scope of the HUD is limited by the visor's edges, but it also treats the view as if it was digitally recreated on a screen inside the helmet. It's called a Hyper Reality Visor, or HRV for short. The entire on-screen image uses pixilation techniques to make it look as if your view is being distorted or being piped to you from an external video feed. EMP grenades explode in a cloud of blurred pixels masking the blast zone and other grenades can sometimes take out your visual filter altogether, leaving you with a blue screen of death on your screen. There is also a "scan" filter that reveals the direction of all of the enemies on the map but it does not tell you how far away they might be, so exploration and tact is still key.
I wish I could continue to praise Blacklight: Tango Down, but honestly the visual style and gimmicks are the only redeeming factor the game has going in its favor. The generic pseudo-industrial rock background music doesn't work at all and gets old fast because it is the only accompaniment in lobbies or the "game searching" screens which sometimes take upwards of ten minutes to find a game. The guns just sound puny and the voicework might as well be non-existent.
