I bet that if you showed this article to someone in the past (circa 1998), they’d probably see it as either sacrilege or literally the coolest thing ever created. However, I don’t take stock in the activities of both past-people and errant time travelers, I only care about this custom campaign for Left 4 Dead 2: Kokiri Forest.

To a select few (the several billion people who have played Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, crossed with the significantly less who’ve played Left 4 Dead), this probably seems about as amazing as  Ocarina of Time getting a legitimate re-release on something that isn’t a $250 portable. To the rest, this will probably seem unnecessarily obtuse, broken and un-fun excuse for a custom campaign. Does that seem unnecessarily harsh? Probably, but in this case, it’s entirely justified. Away!

At its heart, Kokiri Forest is a rather faithful recreation of the Forest Temple segment from Ocarina of Time. The fact that one of my group told everyone to hold on so he can bust out the Ocarina of Time walkthrough is a testament to the campaign’s homage.  The first level starts with the players starting off in Link’s House, then progressing through the village to the entrance to the Forest Temple. The second map is where the campaign really hits its stride. In this level, the Forest Temple is represented in all of its key-collecting, Poe-capturing glory. Endless hours of fun await as players progress through a section, realise that they don’t actually have enough keys to keep going, back-track to the beginning, etcetera. The backdrop of a Left 4 Dead campaign really adds a sense of urgency because of the always-present Director tossing hordes at you whenever you find a locked door, or a sliding block puzzle, or when it’s bored.

In fact, the Forest Temple is so faithfully recreated, down to that damn music, that I caught myself idly wishing out loud for the creation of a Water Temple recreation. Blast you, NickNak, for wishing such suffering on myself. On the other hand, that would be hilarious with a group of Zelda-savvy people wandering about the Water Temple, raising and lowering water willy-nilly to figure out just how the hell you worked it out thirteen years ago.

However, despite the map’s quality showing through, there are a handful of issues that drag the campaign down from what it could be. My main complaint is the rather gratuitous use of color-correction. Once inside the Forest Temple, everything takes out a sort of washed-out, grey tone that really doesn’t fit the vibrant (or overly-green) feel of the first level. Second issue: the blockiness of everything. I know Ocarina of Time came out 13 years ago, but this is 2011. It doesn’t have to be blocky merely because the original was blocky. It would be loads better if there was less sharp corners on everything.

These two, coupled with various other niggling little issues like the lack of defibrillators and health packs, the overall darkness of everything and some rather bizarre artifacting (my temps were below 50C) I experienced in the third level, really bring down the overal quality of the map.

Despite these other issues, the main issue with this map could very well be the person playing it. If you’ve never played Ocarina of Time, or if you played and hated it, this very well could be an extremely frustrating experience. My advice is play the original game first, then try this. Once you know how most of the puzzles work and how the level is laid out, it becomes a significantly more enjoyable time, especially if you can snag two or three other friends to group with. If you do find other people equally as nerdy as you, Kokiri Forest is a flawed, wonderful, mysterious and maddening masterpiece of a homage to the original Ocarina of Time. If not, it falls way short of what the average gamer would consider a fun Left 4 Dead campaign.

Kokiri Forest can be downloaded off Left 4 Dead Maps, which I’ve handily linked to.

In the great, glorious past of six days ago, a group of intrepid modders decided that those darn, uppity mountains weren’t getting quite enough hate. The only remedy for this was to port the huge and gorgeously-detailed Left 4 Dead campaign I Hate Mountains to its sequel, Left 4 Dead 2. This took about eight months, all said and done; one would think that porting a campaign from one game to another, similar game would be easy. However, Valve does some wacky, wacky things with their SDKs, and makes supposedly simple things crazy difficult. But, at the end of the eight-month-period, here’s one of the most quality Left 4 Dead campaigns… ever.

When the first version of the campaign was released early last year, I played the heck out of it. It had several really unique stand-out moments, like the entire third level with the catacombs and the mansion defense in the second level. It was pretty much flawless, which is saying something because it was one of the first Left 4 Dead campaigns that I played. Congratulations, I Hate Mountains developers, you’ve officially spoiled me. How dare you.

The second campaign, officially titled “I Hate Mountains 2″ is basically the same thing, except in Left 4 Dead 2. There are several things they can improve with this new version. First, they dropped the ball on their sequel naming. Here’s some suggestions: I Still Hate Mountains. I Hate Mountains Again. The Sight of Mountains Continues to Fill Me With Homicidal Rage. Come on! I guess simply adding the 2 makes it more succinct or something.

Anyway, for those who are planning on downloading it, the Left 4 Dead 2 version is basically the same as the Left 4 Dead 1 version, except you get the Left 4 Dead 2 goodies like better gore, melee weapons, and the uncommon and special infected. The same survivors are there, and the maps are pretty much the same. So, the version you download is pretty much based on which game you have more of a preference to. Do you like the rapid-fire machine pistols that fire faster than any conceivable gun ever? Go for the Left 4 Dead version. If you like the more polished gameplay, go for the second version.

Although, a word of warning. This campaign, as an unfortunate by-product of its absurd detail, ran incredibly slowly on my modest, five year old rig. Where I would get 40FPS or higher in any other campaign, I was getting 25FPS tops, dipping down into 15FPS in intense firefights.

Go download it! There’s a huge button that says CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD. Wonder what it does?

Yes, it’s the end of November and there’s some Portal goodness for everyone’s enjoyment. In a shocking twist of fate, the Blue Portals mod team managed to both set a deadline and finish it on time. I played through the ten-level Portal mod… and I was rather indifferent to it. It did a lot of things right, but it wasn’t super fantastic amazing.

The main thing I was most disappointed about was actually the entire premise of the game. I thought that the sections in the original Portal where you were constrained to a single portal was easily the dullest parts of the game, and it only really hit its stride once you got the ability to use the yellow portal. Now, here’s Blue Portals making and entire mod (and a lengthy one at that) using the ability to only shoot one portal at a time. I’m torn between the saying that it was decent or the need to say that it was terribly boring.

But, it wasn’t terribly boring. Not really, at least. The fact that you only get one portal to shoot makes the puzzles more difficult then they would be if you had both portals. Couple this with the level and puzzle design being almost fiendishly difficult makes the puzzles enough to tear hair out over. The puzzles, to put it quite bluntly, don’t have the same sort of ‘aha!’ moments that arise when I finally complete the puzzle, because my enjoyment was sapped over the course of playing this mod that each successive failure had me itching for the quit button. Once I got to the end of the mod (which timed puzzles are easily detestable) there was not the sort of clever joy that has you feeling accomplished and hi-fiving your friends; just a sort of detached sadness was all I felt.

I’m not going to expound upon Blue Portal’s mediocrity: it’s not bad, but it has a significant way to go before it can be considered great. The difficulty was easily the worst part of Blue Portals. Several times I had to press escape to make sure I was still playing the same mod and not some sort of hilariously-hard Portal knockoff. Unfortunately, I was playing the same mod I had been. Now, I don’t doubt that some of you folks would have no problem sailing through Blue Portals, then look at this review and say “Tyler, Portal was the easiest game ever and this mod was also easy! There’s no Portal mod that’s hard enough to complement my manly physique and ability to comprehend 3D space! Why are you complaining about this mod are you dense or something?” What matters is that me, a person who had an easy time of Portal and has decent enough skills in puzzle games in general was constantly thwarted at every turn as Blue Portals  flip-flopped between stupidly easy diversions and fiendishly hard puzzles, much like the last level. It’s simply not fun for the layman to play something like this.

The art design is decent enough, though. It’s incredibly similar to the clinical white-n’-black tone of Portal, but the white got sepia all over it and the black was offset by funky abstract square designs. The debris scattered around the last level was distracting, though. It doesn’t get the state of decay that the Blue Portal team was quite striving for, and the dirt and traffic cones simply looks like someone unpleasant was living there for a while. You can’t interact with the garbage at all, and in some cases you literally can’t interact with it. The garbage bin at the start of that level can attest to that as I walked straight through it. The graffiti was nice in the few instances that it appeared.

One thing that constantly grates on me was the AI narrator. The dialogue was bad, the obviously text-to-speeched voice was muddled and difficult to understand and it just sounded weird. I ended up just completely ignoring the AI because I couldn’t understand a thing that he was saying, and the bits that I could understand was boring. Boring boring boring. All the AI had to say was something to the effect of what the test chamber was about. This test chamber has magnets. This test chamber has electrocuted water. This test chamber–shaddup. I’m trying to do things here. Your lack of wisecracks, dark humor or anything that would resemble in any way a personality was quite simply grating.

It may seem like I’m comparing Blue Portals to the game that spawned it. Yes, I am. Any mod that purports to being more of Portal will inevitably be compared to that from whence it came. It’s unfair, but when a mod attempts to be Portal whilst failing on as many levels as Blue Portals has failed… let’s just say that it happens to be the opposite of being a good game. When your only hook is only one portal and a story almost carbon copied from Portal there’s not a whole lot of points in your favor.

You can download Blue Portals here.

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.

So you say that the city’s been overrun with zombies and creatures from another universe, and there’s hardly anyone living in sight? I’m assuming that the chance of survival is slim to none, right? Sounds like a challenge.

1187: Episode 1, which for some reason I keep typing 1887 (probably a result of my subconscious wanting of a decent steampunk shooter),  is supposed to be a episodic shooter set in the same universe as Half-Life 2, although set in what I assume to be the Netherlands, due to the constant mention of Amsterdam.

I’m not entirely sure what to think of 1187. It’s pretty much a straight-forward Half-Life 2-esque  shooter. This is where it succeeds. Where it fails is where it actually tries to do things differently from HL2.

What 1187 manages to succeed at, it succeeds with flying colors. The level design is fantastic in most places, especially the sewers and the apartment building at the beginning. The only niggling issue with the level design (which could have easily been my own fault) was the one time when I got trapped underneath a door, at which point I was promptly electrocuted to death.  Other than that, it’s a pretty convincing representation of a small town. The levels aren’t obviously designed to make it easy for you to hide and take cover; a lot of the maps are wide-open streets and sewers that prevent you from finding a good hidey-hole. Unfortunately, this also makes it incredibly frustrating, especially during chapter seven. My word, chapter seven. I have never thrown up my hands that many times, due to me dying too much on chapter seven.

Which brings me to my next point: the AI. You have an AI partner, John, that follows you around and occasionally blasts monsters with a shotgun, which he “found in his butt”. Stay classy, John. In the dreaded hell-pit of chapter seven, you’re tasked with shooting down a helicopter with a rocket launcher found conveniently lying around. I ducked into a garage with John in tow, hoping to hide for a bit from the one thousand, one hundred and eighty seven soldiers wanting to kill me and only me. John then decided to glue himself to a wall and not move for anything until I had removed that helicopter from that plane of existence.

This includes when enemy soldiers poured into the garage, killing everything except John, who ignored and was ignored back. When I ventured out into the deadly streets, John remained in the garage with his back to the wall while I was turned into silent protagonist  confetti.

It would have been fine, seeing as John, though a step in the right direction for AI companions, was almost utterly useless in combat. He still shot the enemies, but I was ending up shooting them so much faster that at the end of the battles I had killed the vast majority of the enemies. It also would have been fine if I could have taken more damage, since John was nigh-invulnerable. I can see the reasoning behind this: instead of being a space marine or a suited lab technician I was merely some smuck off the street hoping to pave my way in a world gone mad. It still irked me that John, self-professed as “not handy in a fight” would be able to take several magazines in the face, both by enemies and myself without so much as shrugging.

It’s not bad, it’s just incredibly hard–but an artificial hardness. Zombies take up to four shotgun blasts in the face, while vortigaunts take up to six. Ammo is pretty scarce, so you have to juggle between running for your life and defending yourself, because melee is next to useless against vortigaunts and soldiers. But the problem is that it’s so heavily scripted that you often have to clear a room of its enemies before you can progress. You shoot everyone, John says something worldly and philosophical and the door can open to the next room. Lather, rinse, repeat. It’s a kind of monotony that is only slightly alleviated once you get out of the sewers.

Back to the graphics. The graphics themselves, stemming out of the level design is quite nice. The walls of the sewers look appropriately slimy, the guns are well designed enough and the plethora of custom models make the game seem unique. But here comes the nitpick train, and its stop is the first-person viewmodel animations. I’ve only occasionally had a game make me feel queasy after playing it, and the normal cause of nausea is motion blur. In 1187′s case, it’s the viewmodels. Running with a gun out is enough to make me feel sick, as the protagonist flails it around like he’s having a spasm attack. The knife attack animation is one of the prime culprits in this: hit something with it, and the entire screen gives a sickening lurch.

Also, the flashlight sometimes refuses to turn on, forcing me to flail around in near-pitch darkness every once in a while.

Now, some might interpret my nitpicking as evidence that I disliked 1187. I didn’t. It was fun; not a particularly polished experience but fun nonetheless. Aside from some rather baffling design decisions, the end product was fun. It’s decent at best, mediocre at its worst.

You can download 1187 Episode 1 in this corner of the internets. It’s rather hefty at 1.2GB, and you’ll need Episode 2 to play it.

Serpent: Resurrection was a game that I really wanted to love. I’m just not entirely sure if it wanted to love me back. I don’t think that I’ve ever played a game that is so blatantly off-putting, but well crafted.

Okay, I’ll admit it: I only played for about two hours. It bothers me a whole heck of a lot, since I really wanted this game to be fun. I wanted it to be the same game as Doom was, just with a coherent, well-told story and some RPG elements. But, after playing this mod for those two insufferably long hours, I’m not entirely sure that was a good thing.

After the introduction, which to my mind was quite impressive, you’re plopped into a house in the town of Dull Urbanness. I bet that this town had a name defined for it somewhere along the lines, but when every building is five stories tall and painted the same way, it quickly collapses into a dull, humdrum mess of similar buildings, similar people, similar settings.

The population of Dull Urbanness is separated into two gangs: the Orange-clad Punching Bags and the Dirty Jerkfaces. I spent a good ten minutes wandering about Dull Urbanness, gleefully smacking the Orange-clad punching bags into messy red smears in one of the many warehouses in Dull Urbanness, a city of warehouses. Suddenly, my mass homicide was stopped when one of the Dirty Jerkfaces (dressed all in black, probably a social commentary of some sort) shanked me to death.

At this I had to sit in stunned bemusement for a while. The Dirty Jerkface gang freely wanders the streets, shanking intrepid adventurers but leaving the oh-so-punchable working class people alone? Facing no other choice, I restarted the game and attempted to find my way out of this urban hellhole.

After a few minutes of wandering about, I found that the warehouses actually served some sort of purpose. A sprawling dock system was hidden from view, probably on account of the numerous five story buildings. Upon walking up to the closest boat (and murdering a couple sailors and deckhands on the way there) I discovered that this was where I was supposed to go the whole time. The captain of this stately sailing vessel took no notice of the fact that he was short about half of his crew, and immediately whisked me off to adventure.

By adventure I mean the longest, most insanely boring cut-scene I have ever witnessed in a game. The captain telepathically spoke to me through the onscreen dialogue. I couldn’t be bothered reading any of it. It’s not that it was boring, but it was set up in the most uninteresting manner I could think of. Also, the dialogue didn’t differentiate between the captain, you or one of the many now-replenished deckhands. You’re just supposed to assume that who’s talking is the person you’re hoping is talking.

Just then, the least interesting dragon attack. The fog rolled in, the captain complained about the fog. Then, the captain says something about a dragon attack. I could see the dragon off in the fog flying around, and I prayed to as many deities I could think of that finally–finally!–I could actually do something worthwhile. But alas, all that happened was me running all over the deck of the ship in mute panic whilst the cannons moved back and forth and the sailors strolled around in unconcerned boredom.

Finally the boat dumped me off with a friendly comment: “You can buy stuff from the shops as long as someone’s still alive!” To my dismay, no one was still alive. But, I was finally set free from the trappings of the plot and was able to wander around the countryside murdering things.

Or so I thought. It should have occurred to me back in the town with the stab-happy muggers: this game is unforgivingly hard. One chomp from a plague rat, a stereotypically weak monster, and a sixth of my health is gone. Couple this with the fact that roving bands of monsters spawn randomly as a bid to emulate the old-school RPGs of yore and you have a game that hates you and everything you stand for. I wandered into a house to kill some of the hulking troll-things and steal their pants and magical paraphernalia. As I walk out of the door, there’s three more troll-things, two rats and a pack of German Shepherds. This is not “hard difficulty”. There is no universe in which this would be considered hard difficulty.

Upon writing this, I realize just how much I disliked Serpent. I like to say that if the first hour or so of a game doesn’t capture your attention, then there is no reason as to why you should continue playing it. I gave two hours to Serpent, and I came out with two hours I could have spent doing something else. It’s not a bad game, but its beginning is not good. It’s ambitious but ultimately fails to achieve its ambition. Some people may like it, and some people do like it. I’m just not one of those people.

You can download Serpent: Resurrection hereabouts. You need the latest version of GZDoom and a copy of Hexen to play it.

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.

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.

It appears that when modder keved tells you when something’s “almost done,” you better listen to him, doggone it, because he’s probably telling the truth. Not any more than twenty days after saying “it’s coming out soon”, keved’s four level campaign One 4 Nine releases onto the unsuspecting public. UPDATE: I actually review it.

I’ll spare you a lengthy writeup over the campaign’s features, since Matthew already did that in his original post. But one reason you might want to check this out, other than the unique desert setting would be the promises of a unique and totally new finale. We already know that it has something to do with aliens and tombs, so it’s hard to get anything better than that. Spaceships? Lasers? Spaceships with lasers on them?  Left 4 Dead in space?

Wait, this is good stuff. There really needs to be a campaign set entirely in space.

Anyway, One 4 Nine is only on Left 4 Dead–for now–but there will be a Left 4 Dead 2 version forthcoming. You know, if you prefer like to smack zombies with things instead of shooting them.

So you know how I said that I’d spare you a lengthy write-up? Well, I changed my mind. Consider the rest of this post a review of sorts. It’s not going to be a really long review, since it’s easier to write long reviews if the item in question has bad things that I’d need to nit-pick into oblivion. But, I will go as far as saying that this is one of the best Left 4 Dead campaigns I’ve played. Since that repartee only consists of the fabulous I Hate Mountains, that’s saying something. Or nothing at all, take your pick.

One thing that never ceased to impress me all throughout the campaign is the fact that it really seems like the abandoned Army base you run through for most the campaign had people in it before the zombies took over. Hastily-erected barricades, well-placed machine guns, evidences of firefights, it all seems like that there was people there, they were fighting for their lives and eventually, they lost. It’s a really nice touch and a nice change from office buildings that seem virtually untouched.

Because the doomed inhabitants of the base died fighting for their lives, there’s a lack of weapons and ammunition that takes some getting used to. Normally, in Valve campaigns and other customs, you’re basically tripping over weapons and ammo piles. There’s very few times in both Left 4 Dead games where you’re actually in want of ammo. This would be one of those times. The criminally overpowered pistol kept me through most of the first two levels, and it wasn’t until halfway through the second that I actually found an SMG. Zoey, though, had an M-16 at the end of the first. She was holding out on me, the fiend.

Visually, the map is quite a spectacle. In the outdoor areas (and a few of the indoors) keved seems to have gone a little overboard with the sepia tone filter, though it’s not quite as much as the color-correction/acid trip of a finale. It’ll be really difficult to explain the finale, because it’s rather odd and I don’t want to spoil it. I expected aliens, and keved delivered, but I didn’t expect those aliens. You’ll know when you play through it. It’s both a surprising and completely logical ending, though the actual end was kind of weak. I expected something a little meatier than what happened right before it cuts to the credits.

Is this worth your time? Yes, most definitely. In terms of quality and attention-to-detail, it rivals Valve campaigns. It’s a tad long for a four-level campaign though, but that’s something that’ll apparently be rectified in version 2.

You can download the campaign riiight around here.

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