The sequel to 2010 downloadable FPS Blacklight: Tango Down has just got itself a name - Blacklight Retribution - and a publisher.

First revealed earlier this year, the Zombie Studios-developed game is being re-modeled as a free-to-play PC shooter, built on Unreal Engine 3 with DirectX 11 support.

As shown in the trailer below, the game is taking a more futuristic approach than its predecessor, with rocket-powered mechs joining the fray.

Torchlight backer Perfect World have signed on to publish, taking over from Ignition. No release date has been pinned down yet.

"We've wanted to develop a high quality and yet free-to-play first person shooter for years, which is why we're excited to be teaming up with Perfect World, an online-game developer and operator with more than eight years of experience in the free-to-play space," said Zombie CEO Mark Long.

"We know how to make thrilling first person shooters and Perfect World have vast experience in publishing various games in different markets. With this alliance of expertise, PC gamers can look forward to a high quality first person shooter that is available for everyone to play."

The ambitious original promised much but failed to deliver when it arrived on PC, PlayStation Network and Xbox Live Arcade last year.

"The world simply doesn't need another passable multiplayer shooter whose only selling point is how little it costs compared to 'real' games," wrote Eurogamer Dan Whitehead in his 5/10 review.

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Multiplayer FPS Blacklight: Tango Down finally hits PlayStation Network this week but gamers looking for Move compatibility will be disappointed. Developer Zombie Games is much more interested in 3D.

Project lead Jared Gerritzen told Eurogamer, "Move is definitely one of the cooler motion controllers just because it's really easy to track. It's cool, but I think if anything Sony has is going the right direction, it's 3D."

"We have that working on some of the graphics cards for the PC. Other than the fact it gives me a splitting migraine after half an hour it's just so awesome. Actually looking into a screen and having it feel 3D is absolutely the best way to make a player feel like they're in that world.

"That right there is the big thing," he added, "not waving my arms around.

"Games are a way to escape. Having someone moving around to play is great but it's very tiring. Most people work a full day and then they come home and want to sit on their comfy couch and just move their thumbs, not their whole body.

Blacklight: Tango Down arrives on PlayStation Network tomorrow, priced £9.99. Eurogamer's Dan Whitehead gave the Xbox Live Arcade version 5/10, but Gerritzen suspects that was because there was no free massage on offer.

Next week a gaming behemoth lands in our waters. Call of Duty: Black Ops – a game with pre-order numbers big enough to cause retail waves that'll surge higher and further than even those generated by Modern Warfare 2.

So with the masses secure in the cosy embrace of Call of Duty's unlocks and ranking systems, and the resurgence of Medal of Honor alongside it, is there room at the inn for military shooters without a franchise to back them up?

A moment's silence, if you will, for downloadable first-person shooters. There they sit on virtual shelves, waiting to be sucked through pipes into the warmth of your living room.

Yet increasingly it seems no one wants them. No one gives a second thought to these poor, weeping camouflaged games sitting unloved in the PSN and XBLA HQs. Blacklight: Tango Down? An unreturned call. MAG: a few evenings out and a liaison in a dimly lit car-park, maybe. Battlefield 1943? Great, but over the long haul something of a one night stand for gamer and EA alike.

"Breach is a military shooter, so my assumption is that anyone who comes to it has already played Call of Duty," explains Peter Tamte. As the president of Atomic Games, he's a man soon to paddle in the treacherous dark waters of multiplayer black ops soldiery - where the letters C,O and D lurk ever-discernibly beneath the surface.

"That's part of our challenge, across the board – it doesn't matter about the price, we've got to give people who've already played the mainstream games a reason to play ours. There's no point in making a game, unless you've got a fresh experience."

Breach is a game born out of troubled circumstances. Its tech came out of the development of Six Days in Fallujah, a game that prompted a storm of controversy when the Eye of Sauron that is the mainstream media noticed its rather headline-friendly moniker.

Publisher Konami quickly exited stage left, and the project went down - yet apparently not out, since Tamte assures that the game very much remains a going concern in search of publishers and investors.

How, then, is Breach going to persuade habitual Call of Duty players to part with 1200 MS come next January? After the somewhat unimpressive splashdown of Blacklight: Tango Down, lumbered with some terrible matchmaking and the concrete boots of Games for Windows Live attached to its PC iteration, XBLA shooters are seemingly even harder to care about than before.

"Their pitch was all-value, and there are people who will respond to that – 12 maps for very little." So says Tamte when prompted to comment on the opposition, amidst a little eye-rolling at its blue-screen-of-death flashbangs from this correspondent.

"Our point is that that's fine, but we want to create a game people haven't played before."

Breach's schtick, then, is destruction – a ball taken from the feet of Battlefield: Bad Company and run with. Aim a rocket launcher at a wall in Breach and you'll create a hole in the level that'll stay there till the end of the round. Unlike in Bad Company it won't be the same cookie-cutter demolition each and every time – and lumps can be knocked out of interior walls as well as exterior ones.

Breach will even allow you to shoot individual bricks out of walls to create your own sniping positions. Several pages are also taken from Red Faction's destruction handbook in the way that parts of buildings can be collapsed on your rivals by knocking out support struts and blowing holes in floors and ceilings.

Sure, this effect is localised and i'ts primarily man-made structures on each level that can be pummelled. But it's a neat trick, and one that easily feeds into the second string to Breach's bow – the active cover that lets you dive behind broken scenery and poke your gun round the edges in a far more organic and sneaky fashion than in other multiplayer shooters.

Borrowing military ken from their range of military training simulators, meanwhile, another of Atomic's concepts is to introduce a suppression system – meaning that if there's heavy fire on the steadily degrading cover you're hiding behind, you'll find it harder to aim and your screen will shake.

It's all good stuff, but more than anything it feeds into an awareness of just how stale the downloadable shooter market is – so fearful are developers of the competition. It's perhaps understandable when interesting games like Bloody Good Time appear then worryingly begin to circle the plug-hole, and a game like MAG's praise-worthy ambition sadly over-reaches itself.

When creating a downloadable game that'll tumble out into the same birthing pool as Call of Duty or Medal of Honor, there's also the risk that some will see it as an ugly baby.

"When EA or Activision make their shooters they put three hundred artists on it," says Tamte. "I can't afford to put three hundred artists on it! So we're trying to make a game that's aesthetically pleasing, but I can't compete head to head against the graphics of those games..."

Seemingly, the only proven FPS victors over XBLA and PSN are retro remakes and re-releases: Duke Nukem 3D, Doom, Perfect Dark and BF1943.

"BF1943 became the fastest selling digitally downloadable game. It sold great on PS3, it sold great on 360," agrees Tamte. "But BF1943 was still just a stripped down version of a retail game... and that's consistent with the strategies of all the big publishers. They're all telling their investors that their strategies are built on selling expensive games that are mostly sequels.

"Our goal is to do exactly the opposite of that. Our goal is to disrupt the way that videogames are priced, and to contribute to an environment where original content can flourish."

However, perhaps it isn't just the fear of creating a shooter without the vast resources and art teams of an Activision or EA that keeps original content away from those dusty virtual FPS shelves.

As Gabe Newell highlighted recently with his comments about working with Xbox Live being 'a trainwreck', there is simply no way, with the current set-up, that a shooter can truly evolve: console downloadable titles still live and die in the traditional cut-and-thrust retail market.

If a game like Team Fortress 2 on 360 had been given oxygen through updates that went beyond Microsoft's download framework, then right now we would perhaps be looking at a very different picture.

With the format as it currently is then 'a Counter-Strike' (in terms of its spread and its evolution, if not its initial creation) cannot happen on console – and that really is something that both Sony and Microsoft will have to look at as their online services continue to expand.

Without that room for experimental and ever-changing shooters it's no wonder the FPS market is entirely dominated by triple-A military monoliths, the ones that descend on a yearly basis with expensive map-centric care-packages dropping in beside them at regular intervals to crush the resistance.

In truth, a game like Breach might win its place and a loyal following, but it won't dent a world obsessed with midnight launches, adverts on during the football and coverage on BBC breakfast news.

There is, however, a whiff of a shooter under-current that I dearly hope will show itself as tenable against the might of the big boys. I'll be the first to admit, however, that before the revolution begins we need a few more downloadable shooters that a) are good and b) someone actually dares to make. Who's up for that?

Breach is currently planned for simultaneous release on PC and Xbox 360 in January 2011.

The lead designer of Blacklight: Tango Down has hit back at critics of the downloadable multiplayer FPS on the eve of the game's belated PlayStation Network release.

The game divided reviewers when it landed on PC and Xbox Live Arcade earlier this year. Eurogamer's Dan Whitehead was less than impressed, awarding it a meagre 5/10, though more favourable write-ups helped it to a Metacritic average of 61.

"I think a lot of reviewers treated it like it was a $60 game," Zombie Games' project lead Jared Gerritzen told Eurogamer. "We got a lot of rave reviews from people that treated it like it was a DLC game."

"We're doing something a little different. We gave gamers a crap-load of content and we gave them a lot of gameplay. Is it the equivalent of a Call of Duty that has a budget 10 times higher than us? No, but is it fun? Is it well worth the money? Absolutely. I think it's worth more than the money you paid for it."

"Y'know," he continued, "a reviewer gets a game, usually for free from the publisher and goes to some crazy party and gets super-drunk and plays the game and gets, y'know, massages and all that and then they go home and write the review.

"That's great. We sent them a demo version of the game, and there were issues with it, and some reviewers aren't multiplayer reviewers. It's like, 'I'm the DLC reviewer and what I love are side-scrollers that take me two hours to beat, are quirky and have some kind of cool physics.

"We don't have that. We're not a side-scroller, we're not quirky – we're a straight shooter. A lot of reviewers didn't like that, or didn't understand it, or only play the big games and they didn't get a massage so we got pinged."

He's right, Dan did not receive a massage. Publishers, take note.

Things are looking up for the PSN version though. Zombie Games has added a new map and a Join-in-Progress option, which allows players to team up with friends and enter matches without having to wait for an intermission.

The game launches on 3rd November priced £9.99.

Back in July, studio boss Mark Long announced that work was already underway on Blacklight 2. Gerritzen was unwilling to divulge further details but said to look for an announcement on the franchise's future in the next few weeks.

Blacklight: Tango Down will launch on PlayStation Network on 3rd November, publisher UTV Ignition Entertainment has announced.

Zombie Studios' downloadable FPS has been available on Xbox Live Arcade since July and now PlayStation 3 gamers can get in on the act for £9.99.

There's some PSN-exclusive content promised for the release, including a Join-in-Progress option, which allows players to team up with friends and enter matches without having to wait for an intermission.

UTV Ignition has also revealed that the game topped one million downloads over the summer. An impressive feat, considering Eurogamer's Dan Whitehead only deemed it worthy of 5/10.

Maybe the impending sequel will fare better.

UTV Ignition and Zombie Studios have announced that Blacklight: Tango Down will be released for PlayStation 3 via PSN on 26th October in the US.

There's no immediate word on a European release date so we've contacted UTV Ignition to see if there's anything doing.

The US version will cost $15 and will include the various updates patched into the game since its Xbox Live Arcade and PC release this summer.

It also includes new features, such as "Join-in-Progress", which lets you and friends jump into a game that's already taking place rather than having to wait for an intermission.

UTV and Zombie have said to expect more PS3-exclusive content soon, too, with further announcements to follow.

Blacklight is a multiplayer-only first-person shooter built on Unreal Engine 3, and its good looks belie its budget price point.

Blacklight only picked up a 5/10 from Eurogamer on release for XBLA this summer, but has proven very popular nonetheless, with more than a million downloads recorded.

Little surprise then that Zombie is already at work on a sequel.

Video: Our first ever multiplayer match on the XBLA version.