Swords are kind of the video game allegory to guns; if you have a game that has guns, it generally doesn’t have swords and if you have a game that has swords it generally doesn’t have guns. Obviously there’s the odd combination, but it works out like that most of the time. Blade Symphony, if you haven’t gathered by reading the title of the game, is the latter.

To put Blade Symphony in simpler terms: you have a sword and you orchestrate peoples’ deaths with it. I was able to have some time with the closed beta over the weekend (and also the future!). I’ve also played it a bit, and I’m here to pass on to you, the reader, what I thought of it.

I quite enjoyed it! Yes, I know extremely little of the Fighting genre, which as a name sounds like schoolchildren having a scrap behind the school, but I know enough of Half-Life 2 mods to know that Blade Symphony fills a niche that has as yet been unfilled. And for being the first of its kind, it fills this niche spectacularly. Blade Symphony is a game that prides itself on it simplicity. There’s not ludicrous seventy-button combos. You’re not spending most of the game spastically flipping about whilst juggling people. Your feet are firmly planted on the ground, and your combos are easy enough to pull off because there are no set combos.

Which brings me into Blade Symphony’s biggest feature: the stance system. The best comparison I can think of for Blade Symphony’s stances is the stance system from Jedi Academy. You have three stances: light, medium and heavy, which I then assign arbitrary names to. Light, predictably, allows for the quickest strikes while heavy, also predictably, eschews speed for power. Where the combos come into play is mixing and matching different types of stances to chain together attacks. It’s elegant in its simplicity, and it definitely shrinks the learning curve enough that I was able to actually be able to not be terrible.

As a beta, it’s surprisingly polished. There’s no glaring gameplay issues besides the odd bug here and there. It’s easy enough to find a server to join in, the difficult part is actually finding someone to play against (which I don’t fault it for, there’s only ~300 people in). Once you do find someone to fight, you’ll have a hard time putting it down–I kept saying that I’d quit “after this next round”… then the round would start as soon as I said that. Guess I have to fight again, writing this article can wait.

While the beta only contains two maps, one to test water reflections and the above map Winter, its release is set to contain two or three more maps. The mapping and art is easily the mod’s strong suit, everything’s crisp and clear and provides an interesting backdrop to the bloodless carnage that unfolds on each of the arenas. Except Puny Human is going to have to come up with a hell of an interesting story to explain the reason why I’m a samurai in plate mail fighting a ninja robot from the future. Impress me, Puny Human!

Speaking of story, that would be an interesting offshoot of Blade Symphony. The final release is, I’m assuming, mostly focusing on the duel gameplay, but they can easily spin it off to a linear hack-n-slash type game. Just a thought.

Blade Symphony is currently in closed beta. If they give keys out, it’ll probably be on their ModDB page. Or, you can go on their official website.

Welcome to Gigantomods, a new feature that begins now and ends when I say so. In this semi-often feature, I will detail out some megamods: mods that change literally everything about a game (or adds a crapload, like the one today). These mods are often really famous, but sometimes people don’t tend to notice them as they get overshadowed by newer mods. I’m here to rekindle interest in these gargantuan beasts.

The first one is Company of Heroes: Eastern Front. It’s a mod so big it eclipses one of Company of Heroes’s own expansion packs. This mod has done what no other Company of Heroes mod has yet: add an entirely new playable faction. We’ve already visited the snow-swept fields of the Eastern Front back when it came out in January, but it’s worth revisiting both because it’s good and because they’ve announced more goodies to come in the future.

It’s currently the only mod that’s actually succeeded in pulling something like adding a new faction off! Most of the other mods focus more on reskinning original units, adding new maps or new ways to play, but as far as I know Eastern Front is the only mod that actually pulls something like that off. What Eastern Front adds, if you haven’t gathered from the name, is a full playable Soviet Russian faction, with race-specific units and actual full Russian dialogue. I was actually a bit disappointed with the latter bit, as the whole “English with German accents” that the classic Germans and the Panzer Elite has was charming, in a homicidal kind of way.

Naturally, with something this big I would be doing it a disservice to not try it out. So, I downloaded it (all 643MB of it), dug up my copy of Company of Heroes and was ready to crush some Germans as the glorious Soviet Russians. Well, the crushing was conspicuously absent on the Germans, as it was me that was rapidly losing terrain and resources trying to keep up with the German onslaught. I don’t pretend to be a good strategy gamer, here.

The Soviet faction plays like a mash-up of the Americans and the  Wehrmacht. When starting out, there are only four buildings to place: basic infantry barracks, advanced infantry barracks, tank workshop and an upgrades building. Unlike the Americans, the Soviets have three tiers of infantry. The almost comically-equipped Conscripts are easily the best unit out of all of these, because they rely on the fact that you merely have to spam as many of them as possible. It’s the World War II equivalent of the Zergling rush, where you take a couple dozen soldiers with maybe ten rifles for all of them, and you fling them at whatever immovable object you can find. Then, they gleefully run at it, screaming their defiance at the German oppressors… as they’re brutally cut down by the oh-so-superior semiautomatic machine gun. You have to hand it to the guys, they have heart, even though over half of the group can only fling insults while the others fling bullets. Or, if you hate the fact that your little pixel-men don’t have a chance of surviving, you can try the hardier Strelky or Guards.

The largest difference is the upgrades building. While the other factions have a meager amount of upgrades for their units, the Russians have a whole building dedicated to making your units better. It’s not like in other strategy games though, since the upgrades need a fair amount of both munitions and oil, you’ll have to pick and choose which ones would be better suited to what you’re up against.

In less words, the Russians are a more expansionary faction than the Americans are (when comparing Allies to Allies).  Their ability to get units out really really fast (whilst stockpiling enough oil and munitions to get the more powerful upgrades and tanks) is almost unmatched, but the comparative weakness of the infantry units, as well as the weakness of all infantry except Guards makes playing against the Panzer Elite a challenge. It’s balanced, you see.

If you don’t think that a whole playable faction isn’t enough, there’s always the obligatory handful of Russian-themed maps to whet your appetite for new battlefields to fling your virtual soldiers on, from the dank and rainy Russian forest seen above to the shelled-out ruins of Stalingrad.

But you’ve probably already read through this review and the one back in January to know that Eastern Front is what it is: a quality mod for a quality game that both significantly adds to and improves the game it was based on.

What you probably didn’t know at this point is that the next major update of Eastern Front will include a second playable faction, the Ostheer, which is essentially the German’s eastern army. With it will come the usual plethora of new units, buildings, etcetera. So, not only has the Eastern Front team managed to make a Allied army that’s actually fun to play (I’m looking at you, British Army), but they’ll do it again in the eventual future.

Have Opposing Fronts? Download this. Now.

I can has conflict of interest? Well, sort of. See, I really want to tell you lovely people how awesome the new demo of Crysis mod OpenOutcast is, but I should probably mention first I’m on their team as a trial member, looking to write dialogue for them. Still, I wouldn’t want to contribute if I didn’t think they were worth it, and it’s not as if they’ll be compensating me. So what’s so great about OpenOutcast?

We’ve featured it on UserCreated before, but this here is a sequel of sorts to Appeal’s beloved third-person action adventure from 1999, with former Navy SEAL Cutter Slade returning to the distant world of Adelpha. The original was a stunner in its day, and the mod is using CryEngine 2, so technically it’s none too shabby.

The demo gives you two areas to explore – a tiny village nestled by an oasis in the desert, and an island in the middle of a secluded lake. It’s a series of fetch quests that need puzzling through, basically, though you’re free to marvel at the scenery as you go.

And it is marvellous stuff. Some of the animation’s occasionally a little stiff and the AI patterns are relatively limited, but the textures and modelling are fantastic. Overall the visuals are absolutely top tier – a brilliantly polished update of the original’s Gallic comic-book aesthetic.

Music and FX are solid; the score doesn’t particularly reflect what’s going on, and there’s nothing really out of the ordinary in the demo areas. More notable is the amount and quality of voice work. There’s some weird phrasing and enunciation here and there, and the NPCs arguably sound a little too similar, but by and large it’s very professional stuff that’s far above most fan dubs or amateur performances.

Though there’s not exactly much of a challenge here, it still plays well enough – controls work fine with the third person view, and the camera copes more than adequately with open or enclosed spaces.

It is just a tech demo, admittedly. Again, there’s not a huge amount of things to do at this stage, and the team have been unable to iron out every minor bug or quirk in the engine. You can see the joins, so to speak, if you run around poking at them.

But screw however it makes me look. Damn it all, OpenOutcast is a phenomenal effort so far. You don’t have to spend a thing to play it, other than whatever you pay for bandwidth – Crysis Wars can be had for free. If your PC’s up to it, give it a shot and see what a dedicated team of modders can really do when they put their minds to it. And cross your fingers this makes it out – if I get to have a say in it, I’ll be trying my hardest to make sure it does.

You can find the ModDB page for OpenOutcast (where you can download the demo) here, or their official website here.

A nice big feature for you! It’s been a while since we heard anything from modders Cracked Glass and their Source project Tension. Set in a sci-fi dystopia in a future of global warming and cities half underwater, the standout gameplay mechanic is the way players can fling themselves from building to building with a versatile grappling hook.

The early footage promised the Bionic Commando remake done right, and when we pointed out to Cracked Glass we were very excited about what they were doing, they offered to do an interview with us if we wanted. It’s taken a little longer than everyone expected – the team having hit a bit of a rough spot – but from the sounds of this they’re ready to forge ahead once again. Fingers crossed.

UserCreated: Could you tell us exactly who your team members are?

Alex Soustek, Cracked Glass: Well the team just recently went through a little re-structuring. All the same we have myself, the coder and project lead; then we have a close friend of mine Spencer who is doing the music for the game as well as story composition, and for the longest time Cooper had the entire burden of graphics on his shoulders, but since he recently went away to school he’ll be contributing significantly less. Of course our latest team member Mikkel helps with that by taking the reins of the graphics of our world.

I work primarily on gameplay mechanics and backbone functionality of the game. Spencer works primarily with his MIDI and sits there perfecting an ambience that fits the theme. Cooper now does minor modeling work, but is is responsible for every graphic you see in the early footage. Mikkel goes pretty much insane with models – literally, the rate and quality this guy puts out work is nuts. He has been working for a few weeks now and has about 6 different models prepared with a ton of different skins.

UC: Have Cracked Glass worked on any other significant modding projects before, either individually or as part of a team?

AS: Haha, Cooper and I attempted a modding project like this a few years before and quite simply crashed and burned. Far too ambitious for a first project, and we simply were not up to it yet. Spencer has never worked on a mod before although Mikkel has been known to be pretty active in the modding community lending a hand to quite a few mods/games. So I guess that makes him the most experienced with modding.

UC: Your ModDB page makes it seem as if Tension’s narrative is significant to you, but how significant? Did the mod start as a story idea or a gameplay idea? Did you change the story at any point because of the gameplay, or vice versa?

AS: It actually started eerily close to ‘You know what would be cool? Grappling hooks’. I’m pretty sure the exact sentence was “Dude, how badass would it be if you could swing around a city on grappling hooks?”. So I would definitely have to say the game spawned from a gameplay mechanic – and there have definitely been changes to the story based on gameplay. For instance, water kills you – okay, how do we work that into a story so it’s believable, and other things like that. But as far as gameplay changing for story I’m pretty sure the answer would have to be not yet.

UC: Do you think of Tension as more of a fun experiment or are you trying to do something better than the competition?

AS: The answer would have to be both. It definitely started as an experiment and is still a lot of fun (trust me, development would not continue if it wasn’t) but we found out that we hold ourselves to a very high quality standard and plan to keep that up. Just because we aren’t part of a large company (or paid for that matter) doesn’t mean we shouldn’t work hard. Bionic Commando was almost a nail in our coffin – when we heard about it our hearts dropped. We were like “Oh well, it’s been done. Back to the drawing board”. But upon researching it we realized it was too scripted and not focused on grappling nearly enough, and basically came to the conclusion we could do it better – and if it ended up we couldn’t, where was the harm in trying?

UC: Do you see Tension as more of an open-world game, a linear, scripted adventure, or a mix of both?

AS: Definitely a mix of both, because if it was just a free roam world we’d lose the opportunity to put a lot of design and unique locations in – because quite frankly why would we put that sort of design effort into a part of a level where there’s a chance that the player won’t even experience it? I would say the levels will be sort of an “hourglass” design. Starting free roaming, find your own path and eventually slimming down to a single path which houses a cool combo or puzzle and then widens back out again.

UC: Both open-world and linear games have their pitfalls. Have you thought about how to avoid these problems at all?

AS: The plan is to have a linear story path (e.g. not multiple missions to choose from at once) but different ways to complete each mission. Hope that makes sense. Haha, as far as Bionic Commando goes we can’t really have a boundless world – although by just extending level boundaries I think a new level of roaming will be found by the player.

UC: The Source engine is still a popular choice for modders. Were there any particular reasons you picked it? Have its technical limitations affected anything you wanted to do?

AS: The main reason we picked it had to be because of how well we knew it, on top of its flexibility. It was great for rapid prototyping of gameplay due to the large amount of example code provided. Now the levels – if you were to ask me if they were limited, my answer would have to be a capslocked and resounding OH MY WORD YES! I have never experienced as many issues with level creation as I have seen in Hammer; we have had more bizarre errors and crashes of vrad.exe than I can even count. But we just keep on working at it, although how professional games are developed with this is beyond me.

UC: Can you say anything about the look you’re working on for the game?

AS: Well, the hard part about doing this is not emulating Mirror’s Edge, as it really did have an eye-popping scheme that would be immediately recognizable. Although I think as far as our scheme goes it will use a lot of contrast – not between bland and vibrant, but more like run down/high tech, sort of juxtaposing the grimy with the polished.

UC: What are your plans for long-term replay value?

AS: Originally we talked about both separate courses (released as some sort of DLC as and when we finish them) and the single play maps re-packaged. The single player mode may have a post-level screen scoring you on completeness, and we also plan on implementing collectibles (which are still changing too much to release any details) and hopefully some nice achievements (fastest fall, longest swing, etc.).

UC: An awful lot of promising mods never get off the ground, let alone reach any kind of finished state. You don’t have a release date on ModDB. How do you think the work is going? Do you just believe ‘It’s done when it’s done’, or do you have internal targets you’re trying to meet?

AS: Occasionally we set internal deadlines, and I expect to be doing that a lot more now my workload has gone down so much. But as a whole progress usually comes in bursts, and because of this we are definitely operating under “It’s done when it’s done”. To be quite honest, now it’s on to the graphics and design of the world, because the gameplay is very solid and refined. With the tweaks we get from our beta feedback the gameplay may be close to requiring use of the F-Word (“Final” that is, although it is “f$%#ing awesome” as well).

UC: Thanks for your time, and best of luck with getting Tension finished.

AS: Thank you so much for the support!

You can find the ModDB page for Tension here.

What can I say about GMod Tower? Well, it has a really good effect for being drunk, that’s one thing. Not that I would know anything about being drunk, anyway. But I did spend a sizable amount of time stumbling around aimlessly vomiting on things. Which, for some odd reason, was way more entertaining than it had any right to be.

The screen takes a green tint, your character stumbles around aimlessly and occasionally there’ll be an impressive sound effect that can only be summed up as HWORK that plays as your stomach rejects the half-barrel of alcohol in a last-ditch effort to save your liver. Now, as a last ditch effort to save my fragile integrity, let me talk about something that doesn’t relate to bodily fluids.

GMod Tower, as it can currently be described succinctly is a lobby system. You’ve got a large, interesting lobby, or the Tower, that has the ability to branch off into several gamemodes. I’ll go more in depth into the game modes later on. What makes GMod Tower interesting is that it actually makes the down time between waiting for games to open up (or fill up in my case) something you’d want to do. Besides puking all over the lobby, if I wasn’t playing a game mode, I was in the Arcade playing Tetris.

But the Suites are the standout feature in GMod Tower. They give you a space of your own, a place to decorate. I mean, the half dozen stores in the Plaza have to have some use. They’re use is for sprucing up your suite with various items and decorations. If you’re anywhere near clever enough you can dramatically change the layout of your rather cramped space. Or, if you’re like me and possess no imagination, you can simply use it as a space to store your trophies, hats, beer kegs and whatever miscellaneous knick-knacks you have floating around.

Now that I’ve talked a bit about the actual lobby, here’s a bit about the gamemodes. The two original ones are PVP and Ball Race, with Virus being added in much later. PVP is pretty much self-explanatory. The entire premise of the game, as the title suggests, is that you have guns and there are people who needs shooting. It’s not really your classic Half-Life 2 Deathmatch experience, though. I mean, there’s a lot of leaning side-to-side as you strafe, and it’s harder to kill people.

The mode’s main draw is the fact that you can get buyable weapons for it. Depending on how high you place, you get a cash bonus which can be transformed into PVP weapons, Ball Race cosmetic items, stuff for the Suites or miscellaneous items. This is true for all game modes. However, PVP seems to be the least played gamemode out of all three because it doesn’t add anything really interesting to the table. It’s simply the same deathmatch game we’ve seen for a while with some shiny bangles taped onto it.

The standout game mode in GMod Tower is Ball Race, hands down. It’s a rather shameless Super Monkey Ball clone with less manipulation of the gameboard itself. In fact, it’s so shameless, that the bonus level music is the same from SMB. I’m not complaining though. There’s been a couple Super Monkey Ball clones on the PC in years past, like Switchball and the Dreamball Source mod. This one happens to be the first that does Super Monkey Ball as a competitive multiplayer game. Surprisingly, it manages to do it well. The three worlds, two of which I tested, are quite inventive. This caused Ball Race to quickly become my favorite bit of GMod Tower, simply because it seems like the most “finished” game mode. The fact that it’s actually good was a nice bonus.

Ball Race has a similar draw as PVP, where money is given to those who collect the most bananas during the match. I thought this was kind of odd at first, since it’s Ball “Race” and you don’t actually get anything for placing first.

The third and final game mode is called Virus. This seems to be slightly more original than PVP, but more flawed as well. It’s basically a fancy version of Tag, where one person is predetermined to be the “Infected”. The Infected’s jobe is to run around and touch the gun-toting survivors, turning them infected. The game ends when all survivors are infected or when time runs out. I had some issues with Virus, and most of it is situational. It doesn’t work very well on maps with large sight-lines. While the Facility map from Goldeneye and that one from Unreal Tournament work very well, the Aztec map doesn’t because the infected player is gunned down fairly quickly before he’s even within range. Also, you can’t jump. I’m sure there’s a reason for this, but it seems a little odd.

It also doesn’t work well if you have less than four players. Games with four or more were plenty of fun, but once you only get three or less it’s a little tedious. Because the game starts with a minimum of four people, this normally isn’t much of an issue. It was for me because our fourth disconnected/crashed, leaving three of us wallowing in unhappiness.

I’m very impressed with GMod Tower. The GMT development team has managed to do things with Garry’s Mod that I haven’t ever seen pulled off with near enough polish. But after playing for a while I came to the conclusion that the best part of GMod Tower isn’t what is actually included in the game. It has this massive amount of potential for greatness, and it’s shown by the gamemodes that are currently in production–a half dozen of them. The only thing that could ever hold GMod Tower back is the lack of players that plagues so many other mods. It’s not really a problem now, since the main server hovers around 20 players and the game modes only need four. Once the mode that require 10 to 20 players on at a time start coming out, this might be an issue. But for now, GMod Tower is some of the best that Garry’s Mod has.

You can find the main site here . Because of the overlap in content, you need Garry’s Mod (to connect and load the content), Counter-Strike Source and Half-Life 2 Episode 2 installed before you load the game. If you don’t have one of these two, you’ll have missing textures and models all over the place and that’s no good. To connect to GMod Tower, filter the maps in Garry’s Mod by gmt_build, then join the Tower server. Alternatively, click here when you have all the content installed.

Valve decided to make Left 4 Dead go the way of Team Fortress last week by way of highlighting some deserving custom campaigns. Two Evil Eyes is the first of these, so I decided to take time out of playing Self-Loathing Mode Iron Man Expert to test out the newish six-level campaign.

The only way I can sum this up is “Left 4 Dead: Greatest Hits”. As I ran through the campaigns six whole levels I couldn’t help but notice that it all seemed vaguely familiar. Familiar as in, “Hey, I remember that crescendo event in Left 4 Dead 1 where you have to start the van to have it crash through a wall! And that one where you have to shoot the gas cans to burn through the barricade! It’s like seeing old friends!” It was at this point that I realized that these events, that were so shamelessly ripped out of Dead Air from the first game, were juxtaposed pretty poorly into the flow of the campaign. The aforementioned gas can event was the worst of all of these homages. After hitting it with a melee weapon (which said it called the horde, but actually did nothing) then shooting it with my AK, it merely bathed the whole area we were standing with flames, incinerating every zombie that came in and winning the award for Most Disappointing Recreation of a Crescendo Event. No, wait, that’s the boat one. I get those two mixed up.

The setting is a bit of a mixture between the first half of the Parish, Hard Rain Death Toll, and the first half of Swamp Fever. This makes it a rather odd amalgamation of settings and set pieces, with suburban towns blending in with swamps and then the rather bafflingly short thunderstorm on the fifth level. It can’t be explained very well, and it does little to draw away from the fact that this entire campaign seems to be a hodgepodge of the creator’s favorite areas.

The mapping, though impressive in parts, really leaves something to be desired. It could have benefited immensely from custom props, but instead it merely borrowed everything from other campaigns: the crashed airliner from Swamp Fever, the whole bridge from The Parish, the yacht from The Passing, and–oddly enough–the ‘Welcome to Riverside’ sign from the first game. Some portions of the campaign are quite well designed, but it’s completely overshadowed by the parts of it that don’t work very well. Not to mention the developer-added tips, which really sparked all of my complaints with this map.

The most glaring of these so-called tips are in the second level. As you’re walking out of the saferoom you’re greeted by a tip that says ‘health pack over here’, which doesn’t go away until you actually go over to that out-of-the-way area. Upon walking in front of the health pack, a gigantic boulder rolls down the hillside, flattens the house the pack is next to, then continues to jovially roll for a bit until it parks itself in front of a ladder. This boulder ended up incapacitating two of my teammates. Awesome.

The second of these tips has to do with the factory area. Well, saying it’s an area would be a tad bit of a stretch, as all you do is run in, press a button and run the other way. But upon pressing the button, a notification pops up saying ‘go here, the gate is open’. Unfortunately for you, it doesn’t let on where you’re supposed to go after you press the button.  It’s little niggling details like this that sour the experience for me. Not all of the campaign is bad, but the bad bits tend to outweigh the good bits until it turns into a mediocre mess. It’s rather short and not straight-forward, especially for six levels, and some of the balancing is off, because every melee weapon I came across was a chainsaw.

But I imagine that this would be leagues more fun in Versus. It’s filled with many little causeways and catwalks that are just screaming for Chargers to run down, and there was, at least for me, a tank or three on every level. It’s just very dull in Campaign mode and brings nothing really interesting to the Left 4 Dead table.

You can download the campaign over at L4DMaps.net. Valve’ll have the servers for it up until next Thursday (August 26th), so it shouldn’t be too hard to find a Versus game for it.

I’ll admit that I was a little apprehensive about trying this out. The words “it looks like Counter-Strike!” kept flashing through my mind while I was downloading it. I was never really a fan of those Calls of Modern Duty games, so I figured that if I set my standards low enough no matter what happens I would be pleasantly surprised at the results. Oddly enough, Firearms: Source manages to not only meet my low expectations, but surpass them by far. Beneath the tried and true modern warfare exterior lays a polished and well-executed shooter.

But it’s of no surprise to me at least that Firearms is a good game. I mean, there’s only 12 years of multiplayer experience that they borrow from the original Firearms game, even though the original team has very little to do with the Source remake. The Source remake channels the classic Half-Life Deathmatch feel really well, and I’ve never been happier to be wrong about something. If you remember, I said that Firearms was something akin to those pretentious “realistic” games, and it’s nice to not have a video game try too hard to take itself seriously.

Yes, despite my apprehensions I actually ended up having fun playing Firearms: Source. But as I was playing, Firearms’ little flaws kept cropping up and making the four or five complete matches I played into a somewhat sour experience. For instance, the complete lack of a deathcam (or even CS:S’s pre-update camera that looked in the general direction of your killer) led to many deaths that left me wondering what happened.

Another niggling flaw was the actual health mechanics. When fighting another person one-on-one, the element of surprise was the only thing that kept me from losing duels. It boils down to whomever started shooting first would end up the victor. This was incredibly inconvenient for me, since my usual loadout was a sniper rifle, the game’s only shotgun, and bandages. The shotgun just couldn’t shoot fast enough to match, say, an M16-A1. I wish there was more weapons besides the usual assault rifles, snipers and pistols. There’s only one shotgun, and a grenade launcher, which made me kind of disappointed.

I’m pleased to say that the mapping is superb, though. There weren’t too many chokepoints and plenty of ways to actually flank the enemies. A flashlight is needed in some of the darker maps though, and it’s unfortunate that you can’t buy one. The dark maps also make it harder for you to snipe, because the indicators that show if a person is friendly fade out after a certain distance. This is only compounded by the fact that there isn’t much of a difference in uniforms between the two sides (one is tan and one is dark green), and in the dark it fades to a bluish color that is hard to distinguish. Oh, and the UI, especially the Skill trees, is kind of dull. Just saying.

But don’t mistake my criticisms for condemnations. Firearms: Source is great–not perfect, not by a long shot–and the skill trees give a nice little differentiation to FA compared to the thousands of other Source multiplayer mods. There’s a lot of room for improvement, and once the community starts churning out maps for it, you’d be hard pressed to find something better.

So, Slums 2, then. Grimdark mod is grimdark, basically. It’s been around for a little while, but the extended version was recently released. It’s a collection of linked singleplayer Half-Life 2 maps put together by just two guys, modders Diolator and IceFox, it’s inspired by Silent Hill, Condemned and F.E.A.R., and it promises to be ‘highly detailed, dark and scary. Nothing innovative in gameplay, but still good regular shooter. Try it and see yourself!’ So I did.

I thought I’d go with a fairly cut and dried intro since this is largely back-to-basics modding, really. No narrative or over-riding theme beyond an aura of dread; dim (very dim) lighting, fog, blood everywhere and boo-scares. Diolator and IceFox seem to have cranked up the difficulty, even on default settings – I may have been imagining it but everything seemed to hit much, much harder. There’s no crosshair, and no iron sights aiming, so you’re frantically sweeping everywhere room by room – and yes, forget to reload before a firefight and you’re done for. It’s largely shotguns at dawn, with some pistol and SMG ammo thrown in every now and then, the odd grenade and a few magnum rounds – though without aiming this gun is essentially a last resort at best.

It’s Combine troops and regular zombies for the most part, with the odd surprise thrown in. You move through underground sewer levels, up through crumbling apartment blocks, out into the streets, back below ground again and so on. The transitions are pretty well done – there’s pretty much no explanation of what you’re doing or any signposting beyond a couple of messages along the lines of ‘You throw the switch, and a door opens in the distance’, but each of the nine maps flows relatively naturally into the next.

So does it work? Is it a good regular shooter, dark and scary? Well… sometimes. It’s a good map pack, for a fair bit of the running time. There aren’t more than a few new textures and the music is pilfered from Quake 3 and Vampire: the Masquerade – Bloodlines, but the lighting, the colour balance and the sound design (such as it is) do manage to create a fairly intimidating atmosphere. There are moments when Slums 2 is terrific. You’re still aware you’re playing a map pack, sure, but the visceral nature of the combat along with the unrelenting urban decay has you whimpering quietly inside, thinking ‘I wanna go hooome!‘.

But it has problems. Worst are some nasty, nasty difficulty spikes around the fourth and fifth maps; too many modders basically seem to believe if they can walk Valve’s game on Hard, then why bother making levels they don’t find taxing? Diolator and IceFox don’t so much fall into this trap as leap in head first; in particular I respectfully suggest black headcrab zombie plus a room full of poison gas plus a boarded-up exit plus double helpings of fast headcrabs is going a little too far, to say nothing of trying to dodge the sniper in the next level when the first charming setpiece meant I had no bullets left and only a sliver of health.

There seemed to be some problems with the AI’s pathfinding, too, where several times they can clearly be seen standing around doing nothing until you’re right on top of them. And the open areas caused the odd graphical hiccup – I’ll happily admit I don’t have a very well optimised PC, but it’s a quad core that can handle most Source games with no issues at all, so I have to wonder whether Slums’ maps have been tweaked as much as they could be.

Still, it was entertaining enough to keep me struggling through to the end. Slums 2 doesn’t convince me these two should be snapped up by a developer just yet, but when a door swings open within earshot, running footsteps draw closer, the music kicks in and Combine flood the room their mod still has enough emotional punch to be hugely gratifying. Monolith have talked about how their aim with Condemned was to repeatedly almost kill off the player, to keep them hanging on by a thread, and for all its faults Slums 2 does exert that kind of compulsion, the feeling you’re not dead just yet, that if you can keep going a little longer you’ll have come out on top.

It’s far from perfect, but if you want to root around for some quick and dirty, satisfyingly brutal gunplay in a gloomy, netherworld City 17, then by all means head over to ModDB and give Slums 2 Extended a shot.

Slums 2 Extended’s page on ModDB can be found here.

Modding tools are like building blocks, right? And the thing about building blocks is that ever since 1977 once any set of building blocks was made available to the general public, somewhere, a group of ner– that is to say, devoted fans promptly asked ‘Can we play Star Wars with these?’

So yes, some of these people got their hands on Mount & Blade, basically, and the end result was Star Wars: Conquest. If you haven’t come across it already it’s one of the most ambitious total conversions being worked on for Taleworlds’ sprawling sandbox of medieval hack’n'slash. UserCreated have covered it before, but the team have recently got another release out, so… after spending a few hours struggling to resist the call of the Dark Side, here’s what I thought.

Though not without some significant differences, Conquest is basically a Star Wars reskin of the vanilla game. In its current beta state at the time of writing it’s a 200MB download, from which you can extract a folder which behaves like any other module for Mount & Blade. The Star Wars mythos gives us three factions in place of the original game’s rival kingdoms – the Galactic Empire, Rebel Alliance and the Hutt Cartel.

You’re basically dropped next to your chosen faction’s homeworld, expected to pledge allegiance right off the bat, which (as with the original game) makes their enemies your enemies. The structure remains broadly identical, only castles and villages are now planets and their moons, military outposts, weapons platforms or orbital shipyards. Patrol fleets replace wandering horsemen. Characters from the films replace lords and their vassals.

Though Conquest includes no graphical enhancements as such, some of the visuals are surprisingly effective given the limitations of Mount & Blade’s engine. The galactic map is a good deal more atmospheric than you might expect, a flat black plane dotted with planets, stars and various celestial bodies like a shoal of twinkling marbles. Anyone who loved playing with Mass Effect’s galaxy map will squeal with glee at this. Ships have been fairly well modelled – unlike the original, your mount planetside (a speeder bike) does not carry over to the world map, and you can purchase a range of craft to ferry you and your men through the void.

Some of the character models are notably well done – Imperial stormtroopers, Twileks and Tusken Raiders are some standout examples. One or two exteriors are similarly well set out. But for every piece of eye candy to delight your inner child there’s something not quite right. The engine can’t handle fur; Wookies are plasticine nightmares. The same skybox turns up in all the maps. Everyone shares the same throne room, or bridge, or main hall. The animations are clearly the same flailing matchstick men who followed you from end to end of Calradia.

In fact while the makers are perfectly open about Conquest being a work in progress – which is to their credit – it’s still horribly patchy. Why leave so much of the basic text identical? Sign up with the rebels’ Mon Mothma and it’s the same spiel as it ever was about pledging your steel and defending her legitimate heirs, not to mention she’s referred to as a he. Countless speeches are the exact same medieval bluster as the base game; it seems a strange thing to neglect when you’re working with a universe as storied as Star Wars.

More worryingly, the difficulty curve is suspiciously out of kilter. Missile weapons are now so shockingly damaging, not to mention accurate as to see half your men cut down before they’ve even closed the distance. If you don’t outnumber the enemy by at least three to one you have the mother of all battles on your hands, and taking anything other than a lightsaber into close quarters is suicide, plain and simple. Ships are a grand idea, in theory, but yours is so slow, your scanner half-blind and everything else is so prohibitively expensive you need to take out a loan to finance a new one as fast as possible, or you’ll never be able to catch anyone – any enemies you could actually beat will flee before you can even see them.

At the same time, the drip-feed of minor achievements (small victories turning into larger) still manages to compel you to keep playing. Mounted combat is just as gloriously satisfying as ever, even if the risks are higher – even more satisfying, maybe, given how much faster you’re going on a speeder than a horse when you introduce your lightsaber to someone’s face. And even if the weapons are unbalanced there’s something about coming out on top against impossible odds, hacking through a tightly-packed mob which feels, well, very Star Wars.

Conquest is a work in progress, but it’s a hell of an achievement and it does have that certain spark that elevates a mod from fanboy self-indulgence to something approaching a real labour of love. It isn’t yet up to the level of something like Third Age: Total War, but it does suggest it could be with a bit more polish. It does get a cautious recommendation – unless you’re a fiend with Mount & Blade’s missile combat, be prepared to struggle – but anyone who likes the idea of the mod should certainly snap it up as soon as possible.

And you can trade in Ewok furs. Yes, really. It’s almost enough to make you want to hand over some money right now.

The ModDB page for Star Wars: Conquest can be found here. Plenty of screenshots, art and video clips as well as the mod itself.

Anyone interested in modding any PC game should be more than familiar with the frustration that comes with seeing so many projects shoot for the moon and get ultimately nowhere. Sometimes it feels as if any half-decent Half-Life 2 map that turns up is cause for yelling ‘Valve need to hire this guy!’. Michael Anderson’s Outpost 16 didn’t tempt Valve to pick him up, but apparently iD liked what they saw enough to offer him a job – were the Texans over-reacting?

Outpost 16 definitely feels like a rarity as Half-Life 2 mods go solely by virtue of being complete, or at least playable. The fact it’s an ambitious, polished single-player level on top of that invites us armchair critics to go easy on it, and raises the nagging suspicion this is something, well, just okay getting a free ride. Worry not; though it’s not quite as professional as it could be, and suffers from a few obvious flaws, it’s still an entertaining fifteen or twenty minutes which does suggest iD were wise to snap up designer Michael Anderson not long after it was released.

It starts off nice and simple – no elaborate fanfiction here, just Gordon Freeman and Alyx sent to take out the titular Combine stronghold, with some backup on the way. Yes, Alyx Vance – and inside thirty seconds Anderson’s hit us with his strongest hook. She talks. No, it’s not original voice actress Merle Dandridge… though it really, really sounds like her. All credit to Yasmin Joyner, who puts a great deal of life into a fairly average script.

Average as in quick, Gordon; run, Gordon; over there, Gordon; oh shit, Gordon – though while the level never really gets any more complicated than ‘Shoot those guys. Over there. You know the ones’, to be fair to Anderson, he’s perfectly forthcoming about how Outpost 16 was intended as a calling card from the start. The focus is first and foremost on the action, with the level meant to serve as the best bits of what was originally going to be a much longer campaign.

This does mean it’s a mixed bag, however. Anderson’s got undeniable talent – he interned at Infinity Ward before they imploded post-Modern Warfare 2 – but his level’s fairly obviously rushed. It is just attack, attack, attack, by and large, and there are just three main sections. The opening cutscene is impressive, with a good sense of scale watching the action in another bombed-out cityscape from on high, but the subsequent flight down the side of the building as the Combine let rip is too reliant on narrow ledges taken at speed, and the effects are noticeably low-poly.

The parliament building – which is both the final section and the big design showpiece – is eyecatching, but a little shoddy. The custom textures impress, but the fine detail’s not quite there. The firefight that follows is fun, but largely spray and pray with none of, say, Minerva’s furious, intensely tactical combat.

But it is compelling stuff all the same. That speech, some well-chosen music tracks (particularly for the final boss fight) and a good sense of pacing help Outpost 16 build on its creator’s promising technical chops. It could have done with some more work, but when Anderson openly admits you’re getting the map as is it’s hard to fault him too much. Congratulations are very much due; short but sweet, and on the strength of Outpost 16 iD have just made a fairly smart investment.

The ModDB entry where you can download Outpost 16 is here.

Yasmin Joyner’s web page (she’s an artist and animator by trade) is here.

Mr. Anderson’s web page with his portfolio is here. Check it out. Even though iD got to him first.

I suspect there’s a certain amount of overlap between those of us who like to spread our empire’s military appendages accross virtual maps in Civilisation IV and those of us who enjoy reading about deadly, intergalactic space warfare involving alien worms.  It’s only natural – and thus, I couldn’t have been more excited at the recent release of Dune Wars, which slaps an gargantuan dollop of sand, spice, and knife wielding ninja-natives onto Civ IV’s much loved gaming architecture.

The result is both resoundingly a game of Civilisation, and undeniably about Dune.  Where once you battled the French and Greeks, you’ll know be defending the Atreides from such foes as the treacherous Harkonnen, the imperial Corrino, and the all-seeing Bene Gesserit, and where you once fought with blades, horses, and muskets, you’ll now field terrifying Ornithopters, flying hovertanks, and ferocious Sardaukar.

It’s a strangely comfortable fit onto Civ’s barebones mechanics – Arrakis is a beautiful replacement to the Civilisation battlefields we know and love, its vast, worm-infested deserts a more than suitable alternative to the original’s globe-spanning oceans, and Dune’s ever-warring factions are more than belligerent enough to replace our warring states – so if you’re at all familiar with the original game, you’ll find yourself smoothly sliding into your stillsuit – and if you’re some sort of mystical hermit and have spent the last 20 or so years ignoring this behemoth of gaming, you’ll be relieved to know that the game’s automation functions just as well here as in the original package, with the AI suggestions remaining mostly sensible.

The end package then, is a surprisingly comprehensive total conversion that manages to retain all of Civ’s strengths, while transmuting the entire experiences to Arrakis’ sandy wastelands – and the conversion is impressively smooth.  While a lot of the units are still using place-holder art, the amount of custom-content in the game is matched only by it’s quality – each faction has well designed and thought out units that fit into the Dune universe, and you’ll have to bring some serious climbing gear if you’re planning on reaching the pinnacle of their epic tech-trees.  If you’re a scarily overzealous Dune nerd, you may be disappointed to find a lot of the tale you’ll forge is hardly cannon – while a battle between Atreides and Harkonnen thopters or a clash between the Sardaukar and Fremen doesn’t seem entirely out of place, you’ll be hard put to fit some of the epic clashes I’ve fought between the Kwisatz Haderach and House Tleilax in the dune Cantos – it retains Civilisation’s mad appeal of taking familiar faces and having them duke it out in utterly bonkers alternative histories.

Now, I’m not an easily impressed man, but I’d have been quite satisfied with the mod simply replacing the original factions with their Dune equivalents and settling for that – and during most of my initial playthrough, that’s all I assumed the mod did – but dig deeper into Dune’s sinkholes of modding glory, and you’ll discover that it’s more than a mere impressive copy paste job, with a few well thought out features that manage to really stand out, and help it become more Dune and less Civ IV.

Spice collection, so important on the endless deserts of Arrakis, once more takes the forward stage: only your workers can tread across the barren dunes, but you’ll need them to go out and construct harvester teams if you’re to collect the ever-important spice, so crucial for victory –  although expect your operations to be ravaged by the deadly sand worms on a regular basis.  Similarly, once you’ve built space-ports, you’ll be able to pay the Spacing Guild to bring in reinforcements from home, or even use your resources to terraform the surface of Arrakis itself.  These aren’t huge changes from the initial Civ template – you’ll stil grow powerful through the tried and tested techniques of expanding your empire ever further whilst crushing your enemies under your metaphoric steel boots – but they’re still beautiful, well thought out and cleverly implemented changes that accentuate the ever more important immersion factor.

It’s that immersion that makes Dune Wars so worth playing.  If you’re simply another Civilisation addict who’s looking for something different, you’re unlikely to find anything shockingly game-changing here –  but if, like me, you’re a sucker for Dune, incredible, epic sci-fi and love the idea of epic spice wars across the surface of alien planets, then you could do a hell of a lot worse than indulging your fantasies here.  Raising an army of fremen, riding the mighty Shai-hulud, or crushing the rest of the planet through the towering might of the Imperium and it’s deadly Sardaukar – all of that’s possible here, and if you’re at all interested, you’d be a fool to miss out.

Dune Wars is currently out for Civilisation 4: Beyond the Sword.  I’m not currently sure about the Mac version – I’ve contacted the dev and will amend this when I have confirmation.

ModDB Page

1.8 Installer

Dune Wars forum at Civilization Fanatics

A heavily stylised mod for Half-Life 2, Zombie Zoo released its first chapter a couple of days ago. With its comicbook visuals and rather barmy story, it’s one of those releases that really could go either way. And it kinda has. Read on, good humans, to find out what I think.

So it’s kind of like this. Zombie Zoo is terrible. Really, excruciatingly terrible. The AI’s broken, the hit detection wild, the big beastly boxing gloves barely tapping your targets. At one point, even on a top-end PC, Zombie Zoo makes the Source Engine slow down to an excruciating slideshow, so badly optimised is the area. Its jokes are the sort you’d expect from a precocious high school kid making Flash animations. It’s terrible. It’s my favourite mod in ages.

It’s not that it hits that occasionally brilliant ‘so bad it’s good’ mark. It doesn’t, at all. When Zombie Zoo is bad, it’s really bad. Which is, if we’re honest, for much of this first chapter. While the amount of custom content is impressive (basically all the content is custom), most of it is abominable. Textures don’t sit together properly, with extreme-bump-mapped tarmac giving way to completely flat surfaces. Your set of big, begloved fists look awesome until you actually move them. Bears and rabbits sometimes don’t move at all, which is especially problematic in the latter case, as they’re the enemies of the piece.

Of course they are.

They look like this:

They are, for the record, absolutely no fun to punch in their zombified little faces.

That’s the story, by the way. The zombie rabbits have broken free of their pens, and are going around slaughtering the bears. You, an intern, have been tasked with fixing the situation. You must not kill the bears. You must kill the rabbit boss. And, well, quite.

And this is where I start to really like Zombie Zoo. It’s utterly nonsensical and stupid. But it delivers on that stupidity with such supreme confidence that, after a while, I stopped caring that the game was broken, and the jokes weren’t funny.

So you get things like a glorious, hand-drawn intro and outro animation, which left a big stupid grin plastered on my face. You get a voiceover whose gags are so bad you end up laughing along with them, perhaps realising the developers have been in on their own little joke all along. And you get one of the most utterly delightful boss battles I’ve ever seen in a game, which involves avoiding a sea of pirouetting bunnies before punching their leader – who hops around like a fucking mental – squarely in the face.

This is a stupid, stupid first part to what will surely be a stupid, stupid mod. Its hub area can be left in four different directions, three of which are blocked off for now. With episode one taking just fifteen minutes or so to complete, the full thing isn’t exactly going to be hugely substantial. Maybe it’s for the best that it’ll be a fleeting, surreal joy.

But it is a joy. Genuinely. Despite being wholly incompetent in a great number of ways, it’s a mod I came away from properly enamoured. It scratches an itch, and lets you punch rabbits in the face. Try it out.

Zombie Zoo’s developers have taken on board some feedback regarding some bugs in the mod, which I didn’t notice, as well as the problem with the extreme slowdown in the middle section. As such, they’ve removed the installer from its ModDB page for now. A repalcement is expected very shortly, which purports to fix the issues. Keep track here.

I don’t believe we’ve really mentioned Zeitgeist before. Which is rather barmy, given how interesting it’s looking. Today, its team released a new batch of screenshots, so this seems as good a time as any to take a look at this vastly intriguing upcoming Half-Life 2 mod. Words and pictures follow.

Set in an alternative 1934, Zeitgeist’s world is not the post-war Europe we’re so familiar with from the history books. The screenshot above might look familiar enough, and the period vehicle and weapon models that have cropped up over the past few months don’t exactly hint at much else. Perhaps most iconically, there’s Zeitgeist’s enormous blimp – a Hindenburg model – flying valiantly over many of the mod’s scenes. Any allusion to the Hindenburg, and we all get the same image: one of fire, and of destruction.

Nevertheless, Zeitgeist’s world is different. It’s a 1930s fresh out of the First World War, the conflict having bloodily continued for 15 years. It’s also a 1930s in which the struggle for supremacy within Europe has led to numerous technological advancements, propagating at an alarming rate. So sure, the screenshot above might look typical of the era. But a glance at others demonstrates subtle differences: architecture atypical of the period; science just that little bit advanced.

It’s already shaping up to be a vivid and rich world, one endlessly more fascinating with each new batch of screenshots and each new snippet of information released. “Iconic” seems to be the right word: in the London scenes alone, red London buses circle around roundabouts; the Underground logo glows in the night; and Paddington Station stands proud, its trio of curved roofs striking to anyone familiar with the English capital and its history. London’s not the only place appearing wildly beautiful and evocative: the screenshots of Stuttgart, Germany, paint an equally glorious picture.

Despite the fictional elements, Zeitgeist’s attention to historical detail is breathtaking. Today’s update offers a handful of screenshots of the Three Golden Oaks pub – where, if the PR release is accurate (and I have no reason to doubt it is), revolutionaries involved in the Gunpowder Plot drank into the night. And each new screenshot has one thing in common: even without motion, every single beautifully crafted location is utterly dripping with atmosphere.

While little has been revealed of the mod’s play mechanics just yet, we do know that it will be an expansive single-player experience set in a partially non-linear environment. We also know that the London segment comes equipped with a fully functional underground rail network, with players able to catch any train to any destination. There’s no hand-holding, either: if you want to end up in the right place, you’ll have to check the tube map to work out where your connection is. It’s all very ambitious.

And that’s kind of my only worry. Even though not a huge amount of detail has been released (we’re hoping to extract a little more information from Team Zeitgeist in the very near future, so watch this space), it’s already evident that this is a project of an extremely large scale, one exceptionally difficult to execute well in the Source Engine. The team’s claiming not to be using any original HL2 content, as well. What’s in the public domain is vastly promising, but whether that promise will transfer over to the final mod is another thing entirely.

Still, with a good track record behind them – project lead Til Sichel also works on HL2 mod Raindrop and upcoming Source-powered shooter Nuclear Dawn – the Zeitgeist team’s loft aims could well be realised. We’ll be keeping you posted as soon as we hear anything new – it’s a mod I’m certainly going to be following very closely indeed.

Here’s the list in full again, alphabetically, for your ease-of-browsing needs. Normal service resumed shortly. It’s been a blast, people.

The Ball – Unreal Tournament 3 single-player, 2009

The Cassandra Project – Deus Ex single-player, 2003 (episodic, but only one ever released)

Counter-Strike – Half-Life multiplayer, 1999

Dear Esther – Half-Life 2 single-player, 2008

Defence of the Ancients – Warcraft III multiplayer, 2003

Dystopia - Half-Life 2 multiplayer, 2007

Garry’s Mod - Half-Life 2 sandbox, 2005

Killing Floor – Unreal Tournament 2004 multiplayer, 2004

MechWarrior: Living Legends – Crysis multiplayer, 2009

Minerva: Metastasis – Half-Life 2 single-player, 2005-2007 (episodic)

Multi Theft Auto - Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas multiplayer, 2009

The Nameless Mod – Deus Ex single-player, 2009

Natural Selection – Half-Life multiplayer, 2002

Oblivion Lost - S.T.A.L.K.E.R: Shadow of Chernobyl single-player, 2008

Oscuro’s Oblivion Overhaul - Oblivion single-player, 2006

Project Reality – Battlefield 2 multiplayer, 2006 onwards

Radiator – Half-Life 2 single-player, 2009-2010 (episodic)

Research & Development – Half-Life 2 single-player, 2009

Team Fortress and Descendants - Various multiplayer, 1996 onwards

They Hunger – Half-Life single-player, 1999-2001 (episodic)

So, we’ve been playing the Kingdoms Collide beta over the past couple of days. It’s the first release of an ambitious HL2 multiplayer mod, which is very rough around the edges but seems to hint at some decent hidden potential. Read on below the jump to see what Andrea Varotsis and Lewis Denby had to say about it in a late-night Steam chat. And if you fancy, you can grab the beta from here.

Lewis: Okay. So the main reason I suggested just having a general chat about Kingdoms Collide is that it feels like it’s in no way ready for a review yet, as such.

Andrea: Yeah, I think we can both agree on that – It’s hardly what I’d call polished. But that doesn’t mean I’m not having a ridiculous amont of fun playing it. When it works. If it works.

Lewis: It is glitchy. And it took me – and the people I was playing it with – about two games to actually work out how to control the thing.

Andrea: Ah, yes, but now there’s a manual of sorts! Or at least a relatively comprehensive forum thread, which is a start.  But yes, glitchy is a generous understatement.

Lewis: Okay, let’s do basics. It’s a team-based swords-and-sorcery mod set in a world that’s visually not unlike Oblivion’s, but which looks markedly less pretty in-game than it did in screenshots. Each team fights to conquer a series of objective points on the map, mainly by spamming each other with spells or selecting the MASTER SWORD on the equipment select screen, which obliterates everyone else in the world within seconds.

Andrea: For starters. Afterwards, though, it’ll assign you a character model relevant to your role depending on your equipment choices, which can actually be surprisingly diverse. The Master Sword is great, but I’ve found it’s largely useless in the face of my one-shot instakill assassin dagger backstab of death and destruction.

Lewis: I hadn’t discovered the one-shot instakill assassin dagger backstab of death and destruction. I’ve only played for an hour or so, it’s worth mentioning. And it seems to have potential, mainly when people stop just spamming each other with spells and Master Swords and actually have a good, old-fashioned fight.

Andrea: Yeah, that’s the impression I had. It can turn into a gigantic clusterfuck, but in a sensibly populated server, it starts to play to its strengths rather well. Although it could most definitely use its fair share of tweaks. And then some more, and then maybe everybody else’s share as well. But it does have a layer of complexity I feel I’ve just started to get to.

Lewis: Explain this mysterious layer of complexity.

Andrea: Well, for one, I haven’t, as of yet, started exploring how magic works. I’ve thrown a few fireballs, and made a few shadow-powered spiderman leaps, but beyond that, zilch – although I have seen a few players use magic with deadly efficiency and zeal. I’ve also barely started blocking properly, and I’m clinging to the hope I can actually improve. And, as of yet, nobody knows about the dagger stealth instakill. There seems to be a load of content and finesse to the mod people seem to be ignoring – although I can’t entirely blame them, seeing a lot of it is mired in bugs and freakish animation.

Lewis: A curious note: it was only after I finished playing that I even registered it was third-person. The animation’s a bit wonky, but somehow it barely registered. As for blocking: I feel I got the hang of that quite nicely, eventually. My favourite moment so far was a dual with one guy. We ended up really cautiously circling around each other,  with our shields up, then every now and then switching to our sword and taking a swing round the side of the other player. It worked really nicely as a duel. Then about five guys from the other team turned up behind me and killed me to death. I actually think it would work a hell of a lot better as a duel-based game.

Andrea: Yeah, I can see where you’re coming from entirely with that, but then again, the whole mess really gives some of the other classes a chance to shine. My sneak-sneak-stab-stab assassin doesn’t really function as a duelist! But, granted, some sort of organised duel game mode would make for an interesting addition. But the potential for epic fights is still there, which is why I’m optimistic.

Lewis: See, the problem I have with the epic fights is that I seem to be terrible at them. Then again, I’ve a suspicion it’s not my fault. My sword-wielding fireball guy is just too fucking slow. When other classes are specialised at being deadly fast, and my damage ratio doesn’t seem to be good enough to compensate, there’s a real balancing issue.

Andrea: Yeah, I’m not going to argue with you on that point – some pretty hefty tweaks, if not outright cuts, are definitely in order. But hey, it’s their first release after all. I can’t help but be cautiously dreamy about the possibilities if they managed to mold into a well-paced, decently balanced yet endlessly customisable sword’n'sorcery TF2 counterpart.

Lewis: Well, for starters, the classes aren’t heavily played up enough. I didn’t even know it was class based until I read that forum thread you mentioned. I thought character models were randomised, and you just picked skillsets in a sort of Mount and Blade way (incidentally, M&B: Warband – the preview build I played, at least – was the game I was mostly reminded of).

Andrea: Yeah, it was definitely remniscent of M&B – a game I loved, incidentally – but it’s not really worthy of comparison to that just yet. It’s worth remembering that M&B has been in development for absolutely ages at this point. Although, it still isn’t exactly class based: your character model is assigned depending on skillset, but I’m not sure it has any other impact.

Lewis: I think this is key to it all, really. It’s very much a beta. And an early one at that. I’m actually surprised they’ve done a public release at this stage.

Andrea: Very true, and it won’t compare particularly favourably to the M&B: Warband beta, granted. But hey, I’m firmly of the opinion that it’s got potential – even if it is hidden beneath a sedimentary degree of bugs, jerkyness, and general lack of polish. I’m hoping it’s a diamond in the rough, even if it’s a lot of rough to get through.

Lewis: Yep. I think it definitely has. I’ve enjoyed playing it, certainly. Oh, one thing they really need to fix: no crosshair for spellcasting. Which makes it an absolute nightmare to target. Then again, other people seem to have no problem, considering the frequency with which I was fireballed to death in the face.

Andrea: Yeah, I’m guessing it’s something of an aquired skill. I had the same issue with bows. I may fail at aiming them utterly, but I may just be a miserable failure of a virtual archer.

Lewis: I always worry that I just suck at games.

Andrea: I’m godlike. Thus it must be the game’s fault. Obviously.

Lewis: There we go then. Verdict: Andrea’s no good at it, therefore Kingdoms Collide is rubbish. But you should totally try it, because really, it’s not.

Andrea: I like it. Decisive and to-the-point reviewing-that-isn’t-really-reviewing, courtesy of UserCreated.

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