DrakeFox: And by modern sensibilities, the controls are REALLY janky, making the original Resident Evil games (Oh hey there), feel smooth and intuitive to control.
timppu: Yeah I don't recall being overly excited over Fade to Black when playing it. At best it was kinda ok, and of course kinda cool with its 3D graphics, which were not that pretty though.
Tomb Raider, which came one year later, had a much bigger impact on me and did make me very excited over it. It also helped it got 3Dfx Voodoo support too, making it one of the major showcase games for my new Orchid Righteous 3D (3Dfx Voodoo) graphics card. And the gameplay was great too. It was quite a revolutionary game in many levels, or at least so it felt.
I recall visiting some friend's family and he played Tomb Raider with his Playstation, and his mother said something like "Oh my how gorgeous graphics that game has!". I remember thinking to myself, seeing the cleaner and crispier looking PC 3Dfx version would blow her mind, if she felt the inferior looking PSX version was already "gorgeous".
Because "Crisp" and "Clear" are what we associate with 3DFX now ;-)
But yeah, 3DFX was amazing back then, even if what it did was mostly to smudge out the textures and make edges less noticeable.
As to Fade 2 Black. Just like how Flashback had a lot of cool actions you could do compared to most platformers (Still love drawing my gun, stepping off a ledge to land in a crouch, turn around and blast an enemy), F2B also had a lot of actions which went for the cinematic look. From peeking around corners, to sidestepping with your gun held up by your head.
Can't say it didn't try its best.
Biggest sin I believe it did was mostly that the draw distance was atrotious. And there were too many instant deaths (Oops, that enemy you didn't see got close, goop dead. Oh you were wanting to jump over that electrified floor, but misjudged distance of your steps? Too bad, back to last save point)
If someone were to just make a new engine to run it, bigger draw distance, less convoluted controls and maybe quicksave and it might actually be a fun game to revisit.