Description
This mission is designed to be a rather larg one that could bog down slower machines. Although how so is unknown. The mission pushes FRED to the max with 49 ships for most of the mission. The respawn is set rather high to give around 15 to 20 minuets of dog fighting. There are at least 10 capital ships all invalved in the fighting, so again this may slow down on some people's machines.

Storyline:
The storyline for Black Sea is minimalist, involving a huge armada assembled to kill shivans that is set upon by a large Vasudan fleet before it can get moving. That is, i'll presume that it is set upon before it can get moving, because there's no explanation of what's happening as the Vasudan fleet attacks, and it'd be too much to have an Arcadia tagging along with an assault fleet. There's another problem: there's no explanation of who you're being attacked by. The enemy fleet is never identified as being Hammer of Light, although I'll give the author the benifit of the doubt. Finally, the briefing has no icons of any sort, and there are vast amounts of grammatical and spelling errors, especially in the briefings.

Balance:
While there are an equal number of capital ships on each side, and the enemy is provided with huge numbers of reinforcement waves, the friendly forces have a major advantage since they field a huge number of fighters from the start, as well as the firepower of an Arcadia class installation. As such, the player's forces wield enough raw grapeshot to smash the enemy Typhon into dust, and with about six wings of Hercules and Valkyries, the Aten cruisers are merely an afterthought. Any ships and weapons are available, and the result isn't even a fair fight.

Design:
Once, for kicks, a friend and I ran Unreal on his Pentium Pro 200 system at 1900x1425 with his Number 9 video card. The resulting framerate was blazing fast compared to the sort of speed encountered in Black Sea. The huge numbers of enemy fighters are the main problem, since each comes in no less than <b>10</b> waves. Yes, folks, the two-fighter wings of Horuses will end up supplying 20 fighters to the battle, while the four-craft Anubis wings generate a grand total of <i>forty</i> fighters. Don't worry, though. With each friendly wave having 5 respawn waves of its own! This ncludes Alpha, though there is has no effect. Adding to the confusion are 4 Atens, 4 Leviathons, a Typhon, an Orion, and an Arcadia. Surprisingly, Black Sea actually ran slower than the similarly overdone New Jack City, perhaps because NJC doesn't respawn its fighters as much. The battle in Black Sea, once the Atens and the Typhon are dead, consists of killing off the remaining fighters, watching the next wave of that wing enter the fray (what? Garter 39? Say it ain't so!), and watching the 20 or so remaining friendlies make some yummy cheese dip out of them. Not content to leave things as bad as they were, the designer also made the one and only primary objective true no matter what. But this isn't even a case of bad programming in the Sexpressions; there's NO code in the Objectives section! In other words, he submitted Black Sea to Xanadu's knowing full well that it didn't work as it by all rights should.

Gameplay:
Well, it was hard to assess fun value for the first ten minutes or so, becuase my framerate had dropped into the single digits - or below. However, I doubt it would have been fun, since my buddies were carving the enemy into very small peices the whole time. Afterwards, I just watched my surviving wingmen - who totalled over 25 - strike out against the seemingly endless waves of Anubises.

Other Thoughts:
Why did I spend to long writing this review?