Where should be a label somewhere on the box that reads "concentrated gaming, add water before playing", for that is precisely what Black is - a first-person shooter condensed from what would ordinarily be several days of play into several ear-splitting hours. Criterion's certainly done what it set out to do - put the bang back into a genre at risk of becoming a mite stale. It has stripped away the flim-flam of HUDs, tactics, gadgets and different vision modes, returning to a simpler, more honest time when guns did the talking. But it's come at a price, too. Pure, crunching, fantastic action this may well be, but a lot has been sacrificed along the way.

Black is essentially one dazzling set-piece after another, strung together with the loosest of stories told via flashback. Traitors, sleeper cells, Eastern Bloc paranoia and macho military mumbo-jumbo punctuate the action, trying to give some kind of coherence to the onslaught of violence. You'll not want to take too much of it in, of course - the hunt-for-a-traitor-within-your-midst storyline is something of a disappointment. The ending is far too abrupt and unsatisfying too, but we'll get to that later.

First up, the killing! Criterion's promise to take shooters back to their roots has seen ladles of attention lavished upon the mechanics of holding and firing a gun (and all the destruction that follows once you pull the trigger of course). Black has the finest collection of weapons we've seen in an FPS. Everything feels properly weighted, with just the right dose of recoil, and accuracy. The detail of each gun is astounding too (apparently, each one has more polygons than a Burnout car). Ammo belts protruding from guns swing as you move, or tiny belt clips on sub-machine guns rattle lightly in their casing. After boasting that Black is supposed to be 'all about the guns' Criterion had to go to town, but we've a feeling the developer's been a little too zealous about getting the weapons 'just so'.

See, the thing is, the guns in Black, as good as they are, should be secondary to what you actually do with them. The big problem is though, every time you reload (which is, unsurprisingly, very often), everything in the foreground goes out of focus while you're forced to watch the reload sequence. It takes little more than a second or two, but it is horribly off-putting. In the heat of a battle, if you're caught in the open and made to reload it's as though your glasses have fallen off.

Why Criterion thought we'd want to endure these eye-aching moments of seeing the screen blur in and out of focus is anyone's guess, but it looks like a poorly made last-minute decision. You'll notice the demo has none of it. We just reckon someone thought the gun models were so impressive we wouldn't mind having to watch the painstakingly detailed reload sequence every 30 seconds or so. It's a bad idea, and you can't turn it off either. You should be watching what they do, not watching the weapons themselves.

As an exercise in destroying the environment, though, Black will not be seconded in the current generation of games, nor many of the next-gen either. Just about everything you see you can obliterate, and it quickly becomes apparent that this is precisely what Black is all about. It's an excuse to shoot and blow things up in the most glorified way possible. Trucks laden with oil

barrels, parked cars, heating ducts, pillboxes, walls, windows and walkways can all be grenaded or shot to merry hell. None of it is actually physics-based (although being so over the top, how could it be?), but as far as scripted explosions go, this is more fun (and more ridiculous) than The A-Team. Waiting for bad guys to take shelter behind a truck before lobbing a grenade after them is great fun - but chucking one through a window is gobsmacking;

a second or two of silence followed by a muted 'whooamph', as the entire front side of the building bursts outwards. It's relentless, fast-paced and undeniably good fun, pretty much as Criterion promised it would be, sure. But just as the game starts to crank things up a gear, when you're fighting tooth-and-nail to stay alive against a volley of RPG fire and armoured soldiers, Black abruptly just ends. And if you thought the Halo 2 finale was a cop-out, wait until you play this. It's a deflating sucker-punch of an ending alright.

We checked the stats screen to see just how much we had missed of Black. It informed us that, in fighting from one end ta the other, we'd only actually completed 33 per cent of the game. The remaining 67 per cent comes in the form of the 'replay value' - which consists of unlocking the abundance of hidden weapons and finding all the secret documents littered about. Because Black lacks any kind of multiplayer mode, it would seem Criterion has secreted away that 67 per cent of fiendishly hard-to-reach content to keep the completists happy. But what if you're not that bothered with collecting documents or extra weapons, but more interested in blasting the hell out of enemies? It's a terrible let-down, that's what.

Granted, that hidden content is going to take forever to discover, and the replay value is assured because the game is so much fun. We can't imagine how anyone would be able to finish the last level on the granite-hard 'Black Ops' mode either, but surely a massive two-thirds of the game shouldn't be about replaying a mere third's-worth of actual content? It makes us want to take our anger out by firing loads of bullets from a huge gun at something. Dispatching the numerous goons in Black s a real laugh too. They fall through glass roofs, tumble over banisters with a wail, or fly through the air, limbs a-go-go. They walk a set patrol pattern so you can be pretty much certain where they'll be on subsequent play-throughs, but we did notice a few flanking us if we gave them the chance. That's about as smart as they get though. They look good, but as with so much else in Black, they're mostly target practice. In Normal made, only a significant number will hinder your progress - otherwise it's head and body shots for goons, twice for goons in armour. Follow that pattern and you're laughing.

The further we progressed, and the more intensely lunatic Black got, the more we were beguiled by it. The lighting effects alone are stunning, while it's worth putting a few quid on the sound picking up an Interactive BAFTA this year. From the muted spitting of suppressed SMGs, to the crashing, screaming blasts of buildings falling down, it beats Halo with a batbed stick.

Yet the further you progress, the more evident it becomes that what you see is just what you get. It makes no pretence at having a proper story, the bad guys are anonymous, faceless sitting ducks, and once it reaches a certain level of armageddon it digs its heels in and stays there. Only with a little hindsight, away from the buzz of the game, is it apparent just how one-dimensional Black really is. Criterion would argue this is precisely what it had in mind, but the shift from the stale FPS genre is one notch too far, resulting in Black coming off as little more than an incredible exercise at shooting guns.

We don't mean to whinge and moan, for Black is still an exemplary piece of gaming. Half-Life 2 and Halo 2 are put to shame by the dazzling array of destruction on show, and the worl of the programmers to construct environments so completely destructible is an achievement that screams quality. The sound, physics, level design and volume of weapons is astounding, yet these demonstrations of Criterion's technical ability are deflated by the agonising shortness, and the over-riding feeling that Black is really just a demo of the game it could, and should, have been.

We're not sure whether Black could have been any longer, or supported multiplayer even if Criterion had wanted it to. The love, time, and energy spent on it is all there, in every cloud of dust and tumbling body. But, grudgingly, we'd have to admit we could have done without quite so much. A little less bang for our buck, and just another five minutes of original gameplay would have gone down a treat. But that's not what Criterion wanted from its first foray into the shooting genre. It wanted to prove shooters could be fun again, and in the short example Black offers, it has proven just that. Here's hoping the developer now takes this painfully short, yet spectacularly sweet game, and turns it into the giant-killing franchise it was born to be. Until then, sample it, savour it, but brace yourself for when the rug is pulled from under your feet and you're sent crashing back into reality after what only seems like five minutes in the most crazy, fantastical shooter you'll ever experience.

1. Astounding sound and lighting bring the world to life, making the weapons on offer the juiciest killing machines in any Xbox game.
2. The destruction! Firing off an RPG and watching whole cars and buildings explode near some bad guys is pure gun-psycho heaven.
3. Raises the bar for gun games. Perhaps at the expense of many other elements, but watch just about every FPS copy the formula.

1. No multiplayer. The thrill of Black would have lasted so much longer if there were just a few maps to scoot around in.
2. One-third of the game is content, the other two are about collecting stuff or completing side-missions. Replay value or not, it's too short.

A spectacular, noisy, intensely enjoyable game about the sheer joy of firing guns, but often at the expense of the gameplay.