Deep Black: Reloaded

Deep Black: Reloaded is a cover-based third-person shooter developed by Biart, a Russian indie studio with an obvious obsession with water. You play Lieutenant Syrus Pierce, an ex-mercenary pulled back into action to stop a bio-terrorist organization operating out of an underwater facility. The hook is genuine: roughly half the game puts you beneath the surface, swimming through pipelines and dark caverns with a jetpack suit, a harpoon, and specialized underwater weapons. That part actually has some charm. Movement underwater feels fluid, the water visuals hold up, and navigating in three dimensions gives the game a brief sense of novelty that the land-based sections never match. Once you climb out of the water, though, the cracks become craters. The cover mechanics are clumsy, Pierce moves as though he is wearing ten-ton armor, and the enemy AI ranges from brain-dead to oddly bullet-spongey. Ordinary guards in light gear routinely eat twenty or thirty rounds before falling over, while the checkpoint system places saves seemingly at random, regularly forcing you back through tedious encounter strings you just cleared. There are over forty missions spread across four environments, but the environments blur together fast. Every corridor, every crate, every firefight feels recycled from the last one. A handful of weapons do exist, including a freeze gun, but they barely affect the feel of combat in any meaningful way. The presentation does not help. Voice acting is genuinely rough, with stilted delivery and mistimed pauses that distract more than they entertain. The story, a near-future espionage plot involving a mysterious biological weapon, is thin enough that you will lose the thread quickly and stop caring. QTE moments interrupt the flow when enemies get close, drone encounters are irritating rather than tense, and the sparse melee option amounts to a single context-sensitive stab. The multiplayer mode, which offers deathmatch and team deathmatch, was already a ghost town at launch and almost certainly remains that way. There is a genuinely interesting game buried somewhere in the concept here. An aquatic third-person shooter with jetpack traversal, underwater sabotage objectives, and a harpoon you can use to drag enemies to a watery death is a legitimately creative premise. Biart clearly cared about the water. The problem is that only about a third of the game actually leans into that strength, and everything surrounding it, the AI, the pacing, the checkpoint logic, the gun feel, is unfinished-feeling in ways that compound each other. The steam community reception sits firmly in negative territory, and compatibility issues have dogged the PC release since launch, including a post-delist update that reportedly introduced new problems. If you have a specific and unironic love for low-budget cover shooters with a curious aquatic twist and a tolerance for rough edges, there is a sliver of something here. Everyone else should manage expectations accordingly.

Alex · Scout Team

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