Like the XBLA version, it all feels just a little too much like a Quake 3: Arena HD, which would be fine if nothing else had released between 1999 and now. Drops across most maps are rare, and unless you kill someone and pick up their gear, you’ll often find yourself nursing the same gun until you die. The weapons are still arguably the worst part of the game boring and generic none of them feel meaty or exciting. However, there is one exceptionally cool one that turns the whole game into a 8-bit doom style arena, which although distracting, is hilarious to look at and play. Most activated 'gens barely make any real difference in the middle of a fierce match, and they cycle so quickly that the impact is generally always minimal. While many have touted the mutagen system as a refreshing change to the FPS landscape, it’s nothing more than a silly gimmick after the first few matches. Firing and bullet impact are practically non-existent, you might as well be lobbing soft boiled eggs for the response you get from sound and on-screen response. Your weapon takes up an abhorrent amount of screen real-estate, making it difficult to see enemies quickly and easily. Unfortunately (just as things were going so well) the developers fell into the trap of keeping the FOV (field of view) settings exactly the same as its console based predecessor. Textures and models have been improved, but frankly, most of this is due to the unrestricted power of the engine being dragged kicking and screaming out of an Xbox 360 and onto the desktop. Everything screams along at the maximum frame rate allowed, with little tearing, flickering or blur. A keyboard and mouse in hand almost transforms the experience entirely, bringing things up from that slow analogue-stick drag to a swift turn and click to target.Īlong with improved movement is the advance of quick weapon changes, easy triggerless firing, and simple zoom. First off, the battles are significantly faster, to the point where it’s actually quite difficult to navigate the shimmering, chrome-like reflections of your surroundings. Once you are in a game, however, you can see both the dirty remnants of a port and the slight glimmer of light from overall improvements. Small games like these live or die based on the first few weeks of availability, so when you punt the title out into the field without all its bits intact, people aren’t going to be willing to wait around for too long. While the developers promise to eventually introduce them, not having them available for launch is a pretty poor effort. This leads me to the first hiccup - the game servers are all hosted at the developers end, there are no dedicated servers available. Unfortunately, almost no-one was playing when I originally jumped on for a game, but I eventually found one in the US (with an awful ping). There’s some training with bots but for the most part you are stuck finding games on the web or locally on LAN. The game is responsive, menus are simple affairs (to the point were they look like they could have been made in MS Paint) and it’s easy to navigate the options, albeit limited.
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