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Smith explains Blacksite issues

"This project was so ****ed up."

Midway's Harvey Smith has admitted that relatively low review scores for Blacksite are "no surprise", admitting to various problems during development.

Speaking at the Montreal International Game Summit 2007, in comments caught by Wired, Smith pulled no punches: "This project was so ****ed up," he said.

Smith's said in the past that he wasn't all that enamoured with the Area 51 property when he first came onboard (there's more on that in our interview with him from June), but it sounds like a rush to completion became a bigger problem as development went on.

"It took eight months to get one thing working," he notes. "With a year to go, the game was disastrously off rails." It even "went straight from alpha to final". Eek. And there was virtually no time to spend play-testing the game.

Asked why he was being so honest about all this - and his belief that they "deserved" a critical hammering - Smith said: "I believe in personal accountability."

He also believes that the game's attempts at satire were either missed or ignored in some quarters, questioning how anyone could react to a particular element - detailed in the Wired report - without thinking "this is super ****ing subversive".

Blacksite is due out on PC and Xbox 360 tomorrow in Europe, with a PS3 release also on the way. Check back for our review soon.