It appears that it’s the end of an era here, folks. Fistful of Frags just got updated to version 3.5, which adds the much publicized overhauled dual-wielding system, various massive AI improvements, new guns, maps and a mode. Unfortunately for all of us, 3.5 is (from what I can gather) the last major update in the Fistful of Frags development cycle.

I’ve already downloaded it and intend to play it over the weekend; maybe I’ll see some of you chaps online in this world where men are men, women are manly and horses are feisty and kick people in groins.

Download it here for your executable-types or click this link if you like your mods in Desura-shaped packages

Recently, an update for space shooter Eternal Silence came out, bringing up the version number up to 3.5. Changes were made. Since the changes were only really noticeable to those who’ve been obsessively following Eternal Silence’s development, I won’t expound upon them. What I did do is get off my lazy behind, navigated to the store page and clicked the little green “INSTALL NOW” button. Holy moley.

Then I played it for a bit. When I was younger, I was a huge fan of the game Star Wars Battlefront II. Not the first one, mind you, I jumped onto the PC gaming bandwagon long after the first one came out. Anyway, Battlefront II stuck with me because it was… well, awesome. It was the perfect marriage of zero-G space combat and on-foot classic shooterfest. The fact that I could jump onto an X-wing, fly around, park the X-wing in someone’s face and jump out shooting was something that endeared very much to younger-teenage me. Almost five years later, here I am; I’m playing a similar game.

Eternal Silence is one of the flagship Source mods: a spaceship shooter on an engine that didn’t have any spaceship shooters. Six years later, it’s still only true space combat games out there, barring Garry’s Mod addons like Spacebuild. Sure, it’s starting to show its age since the developers haven’t made the jump to the Source 2009 engine, but it still stands alone among its peers.

However lofty the game’s origins are, it’s still brought to its knees by the community. Of the nine servers that were running a Eternal Silence game, one was populated. One of these one servers had over 200 ping. I decided to grit my teeth and bear it, since I didn’t want to be caught giving up on account of lag. Surprisingly, the ping was bearable (at least outside of any ships) and the eight people playing were not repulsive. One lamented on the lack of people, even though the eight-to-ten players that were on while I was playing still made for an interesting game.

Eternal Silence definitely subscribes to the Star Wars theory of space. Satisfying pew-pews and pwoooshes are heard while firing rockets, as well as the agonizing fiery explosions of failure when blown up. Come on, Eternal Silence; I like my space like I like my women: empty and soundless. Wait, that sounded less misogynistic in my head. Let’s move on, shall we?

The space, though being agonizingly sound-filled, does have that sort of feel that makes you think, “holy shit, I’m in space.” The several-ton spaceships woosh out of the hangers, then there’s that wondrous feeling when the spaceship settles just as it hits open space. It gives you a tingly feeling when you realize the trillion-dollar several-ton spaceship doesn’t weigh a thing. Remember this feeling when you smash the ship into a rock. A space rock! That never gets old.

The on-foot gameplay, despite being solid, is obviously dwarfed by the space combat. That doesn’t mean it’s entirely without merit. In fact, it’s actually improved by the spaceship bits. You and three other people hop into a dropship. Assuming you make it over the starry expanse of space with all of your limbs intact, you park your dropship in the enemy’s hanger (provided you’ve destroyed the corvettes protecting the hanger, of course). Then, you and your three comrades shoot some people and cap some points. Sure, it sounds formulaic in writing, but the spaceship segment is the icing on an oh-so-delicious cake.

Where there would have been you in a tank or jeep cruising across Nonameistan in any other FPS, there’s you and a couple guys in a mostly defenseless dropship, suspended weightless in space. Then, you pray that either the enemy’s team doesn’t notice your sneaky sneak into their hangar (and faces) or you hope that the tailing allied fighters actually back you up and fend off the attacking planes.

It turns what would generally be a boring trek to the objective into an actually important segment. Sure, getting to the point is important because you need to do it to win. But turn the “getting to the point” part into an interesting adventure all in itself, and you’ve got a winner.

Man, I enjoyed Eternal Silence, and it’s a huge crushing shame that there aren’t more people playing it. Shame, Internet.

‘Tis the season for long-dead mods coming suddenly alive again, apparently. First Return to Mana makes a triumphant return, now Kingdoms Collide is back. Black Mesa, next? Please, gaming gods? Bah, even optimism has its limits I guess.

But in any case, Kingdoms Collide, the third-person hacky/shooty/magic(-y?) multiplayer… game, is set to receive a bundle of updates just in time for Christmas. Proposed changes are two new maps and the always-vague “changes”. I’m rather unfamiliar with this mod, so it’s hard to get worked up over changes. Chaaaaanges.

But also present is the impending onset of new gamemodes, and one player character from that gamemode: a blood-covered quadrupedal monster.

Here’s a video of the monster in creation, overlayed by some rather terrible music:

Here’s the link to their ModDB page.

Oooh, Fistful of Frags: the eminent Source-based cowboy shooter is going to be reaching its version beta 3.5 in the near future. It’s also, bum bum buuuuum, the end of major development for Fistful of Frags. Sadness. The next version expands FoF by adding proper dual wielding.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t fulfill my dream of a game where each and every weapon is dual-wieldable, but it still lets you use two of the game’s large amount of pistols at the same time. In addition to this, it adds three pistols of various sizes and manliness. I think that once this comes out I’ll be seen running around dual-wielding the game’s two smallest pistols. This is an incredibly large possibility.

The newspost has some interesting stuff at the end about NPCs and a fantasy Western-type game that the developers are working on in the future. It could seem interesting enough, so it’s worth looking out for that in the future. One mod ends (at least the big updates, as small ones are still in the future), and a new one begins.

I’ve been interested in Off Limits since I first discovered it a couple months ago, as the mapping seemed to be awfully top-notch. In a video posted earlier today, the developers of Off Limits seem to be keen on continuing this tradition with a video posted about two maps: ol_russia and ol_styx.

The former is a combined effort between Robert Briscoe (that guy who’s making the stunning Dear Esther remake) and modder Wesley. It seems to be an appropriate version of Russia, all dingy and filled with abandoned military vehicles as well as a rather impressive submarine. You know, like all of Russia.

The latter is a similarly abandoned city, with the shots of the mall that were posted last month. However, if pictures speak a thousand words, then videos must say several hundred billion. I’ve included it below for your viewing pleasure.

Off Limit’s moddb page.

You know how several years ago people were looking at Bumptop and saying, “gee, in the bright, illustrious future, all computer interface systems will be full 3D experiences!”? Well, that hasn’t quite happened yet, but here’s a good start.

Source Media Arcade aims to be a way to marry the many, many art assets that the Source engine has with the ability to have your content, be it games, videos, music, pictures etcetera, represented in the map as interactable objects. It’s certainly one of the more original mods, and an interesting step in mod development. I’m just not entirely sure if that would be a step forward or simply a step sideways.

Modding has always been more of a way of improving upon or telling new stories on top of the games that we already have. But here’s a mod that has very little to do with actual games, except for the fact that your games can run overtop of them. Suddenly, the world’s gone all topsy-turvy. Though SM_Sith_Lord, the creator of this… application, isn’t aiming it to be a wholesale replacement of Windows Explorer, it does provide an interesting proof-of-concept of how a fully three dimensional operating system could work, in the bright illustrious future, of course.

But would it be worth it to have a fully 3D operating system? Sure, we’ve already seen the likes of it with Bumptop and those have ranged between catastrophic failures and mild success, as they haven’t really added much of anything to the tried-and-true file explorers that are already widely available.

That’s not what modder SM_Sith_Lord is getting at with this, though it seems to work as what a fully 3D operating system could work like. What SM is hoping to get with his creation is “a mix between productivity and entertainment,”. Unfortunately, I don’t think it’s entirely there yet. The parts are there, they just aren’t in the right orders yet.

For instance, the way one organizes the content is somewhat bizarre. It’s all done through menus, so actually getting the content up into the 3D space is about as intuitive as getting a square block through a round hole; you can do it, but you need to break out the power tools to get it done. It’s certainly not an elegant method of doing something like this, which is unfortunate because to design user interfaces you need a certain amount of elegance to get it done. Therefore, I went with one of the preset arrangements, which worked as well as I could have hoped.

For the most part, Source Media Arcade works. It’s really snappy, starting up in under fifteen seconds for me, then having no noticeable load time upon actually starting the map. It did seem a little sluggish when loading the arrangements as well as actually loading files. Upon loading files, it didn’t load them in front of the game window like the features list said that it would. Source Arcade pushed itself to the back of my desktop, then called the files, which after some pondering eventually loaded. When switching back to Source Arcade, it didn’t hilariously break like many Source engine games do when I try to alt-tab. Kudos, Source Media Arcade.

But as I’m sitting here pondering this I’m struggling to find any sort of way this can be actually useful. Sure, it’s a neat little toy. But is it really worth sacrificing the ease of use for something that may give you very little benefit? If it could be appended onto something like GMod Tower, where one could be constantly connected to a social (albeit somewhat small) world, then I can see how it could have some use. But for now, it’s merely diversion. There’s just not enough meat on its bones at the moment to provide any sort of noticable improvements. So, I’d say that it’s a side step in mod development.

If you want to view the FUTURE (imagine more italics here) you can download Source Media Arcade at its ModDB page.

Somewhere along the line, the Half-Life 2 Wars developer succumbed to Duke Nukem Forever syndrome. Wait, I guess since that’s getting a release, it probably doesn’t apply anymore, right? Well, okay, Episode 3 syndrome. After posting the news article saying that the new demo, with a playable Antlion race, was nearing imminent release, many people cheered and applauded loudly. A month and a half later, all of the applauders went home, because their definition of “imminent” differed from what the Half-Life 2 Wars developers thought.

But never fear! It’s coming in the near future. Not the imminent future, but good enough.

After implementing the playable Antlion race, the Half Life 2 Wars Dev Team realized that due to their rather limited tech tree, by going off of Valve’s already implemented lore, it simply wasn’t fun to play against other Antlion players, which is what the demo would have only contained. Simply antlion versus antlion.

Therefore, in addition to the classic RTS skirmish mode, they’re focusing more on a co-operative survival mode, where a group of people construct a base together to fend off the antlion horde. This… this I can get behind. Most of my friends hate survival gamemodes with a passion, but I love games where it’s you and your closest friends, defending yourselves against impossible odds until you all fail miserably in the end. This way, you know who is the most reliable in the impending zombie apocalypse.

Just looking for the future, I guess. And, if optimism is to be believed, Half-Life 2 Wars will be in the future too. Cross fingers.

The news, the news! Oh, the news!

Oh, here’s a playable build from all the way back in TWO THOUSAND EIGHT.

I didn’t think that this was really under-appreciated (and the fact that it was posted by a developer in the last Mod our Comments, naughty naughty) so I figured I might as well post it right now, though not under the banner of “under-appreciated”. How can a game be under-appreciated if it’s already won an award? Sure, it’s not in super-hype mode like Black Mesa was (two years ago), but it’s not like it’s some obscure breakout from a country you can’t even pronounce.

I will confess that I hadn’t heard about this before, so here’s some words about it. Apparently, today the developers just announced that the team doing Blade Symphony, previously “Project Berimbau”, are teaming up with modding superstars Puny Human. You know, those people who made Dystopia.

It’s certainly got an interesting concept behind it, though. Ninjas from the future-past fight each other in landscapes that would make any architect faint out of joy. There’s three different races, two seemingly inspired by East Asian culture, called the Hokuten Assassins and the Vagrants, and another by European culture, the Black Rose Knights. Of course, this is mainly conjecture, so don’t take whatever I say as hard fact.

But I think that what is most interesting about Blade Symphony, which isn’t a rhythm game unfortunately, is what it’s not. It’s not a shooter on an engine which is defined by its shooters, instead priding itself on close-in blade combat. It’s a total conversion, which is even more rare than the first point. It’s more focused on smaller battles compared to the 32 player shooterfests that we so often see.  And, the mapping looks good. Scary good. Of course, we’ll have to see how it plays once the mod is actually released in the near future*. There hasn’t been a whole lot of gameplay footage, besides one rather grainy and old trailer with a bunch of people somersaulting around.

Will it make a splash like it’s older brother, Dystopia? It certainly appeals more to a niche audience than Dystopia ever did, but I don’t think that would stop people from enjoying it. It’s it’s a quality game, the people will come.

ModDB  page? I think so.

Website link? I also think so. Don’t you?

*pending “when it’s done” syndrome.

Woo, Zombie Master! Yet another mod to join the landslide of Source 2007-based games, thus sealing away beast that is Source 2004 forever. But what’s interesting about this new version of Zombie Master isn’t that the engine is getting a shift, it’s that it’s considered a sequel to the original instead of merely an update with some new features.

And it seems to be an actually proper overhaul. No part of the mod is safe from the modder’s renovating hands,  and therefore most of the content seems to be poked, prodded, stripped and redone.

And when I say nothing is safe, it really means that nothing is safe. The HUD’s being redone, the maps are being rejiggered, new ewapons and suchlike are being added, and a host of other additions and fixes that I will include in list-tastic form slightly below here.

Zombie Master 2 requires Source SDK Base 2007.

There will be new content such as maps, models, weapons, etc.

The HUD will be fully remade, but there will still be the option to use the original interface.

New functions for the Zombie Master will be added. Such as the Zombie Vision.

The Zombies are enjoying a complete makeover. (Animations, skins, etc.)

We will not announce a release until we are sure it will work out.

The official homepage will be up very soon.

Yes, lists.  Anyway, it’ll be interesting to see how this all turns out. Zombie Master is a classic of sorts, although being 3 years old isn’t really “classic”, but it’s one of those mods that seems to fit into conversations regarding good Half-Life 2 mods. Not that I’ve ever had one of those conversations, mind.

Oh yeah, the link.

I’m not entirely sure how I feel about this new Pirates, Vikings and Knights II update. On one hand, the previous voiceovers are being replaced by sexy new voices unique for each class. On the other hand, my days of running around like a madman as a Viking, mindlessly shouting “YOU ARE NO MAN” to anyone that happens to be within earshot are sadly numbered.

From the Audio Milestones that have been published by the developers, the new voices seem to be worthy replacements of the “so-bad-it’s-amazing” voices that they have right now. My current favorite has to be the Skirmisher sounds, that voice actor seems to have captured the essence of that class very well, simply by casting him as a twitchy, psychopathic pirate who occasionally bursts into rousing sea shanties in the middle of battle. And the Heavy Knight’s muffled Monty Python and the Holy Grail quotes are eerily appropriate.

Also, it seems that the weapon sounds are being replaced. I thought that the old weapon sounds were perfectly fine as it is, with their only downside being that they were all the same. You know, the same problem that the characters suffered from.

While you’d expect something as massive an undertaking as this to be all that would be included in the next update, there’s a few goodies on the gameplay side of things. Well, if you consider unlockable titles as “gameplay,” that is. I can’t wait to run around as “Zyzzi the Instinctive Nocker” or “The Ballerina” to justify my masculinity in an ironic way.

There’s some fancy new shader work as well; from the looks of it, they’ve made it so the light plays over your chosen implement of death better than it used to. Neat.

It doesn’t seem like there’s an ETA on this update just yet, but it looks to be nearly done. Hopefully.

You can download PVKII on Steam right now! Right now!

Also, the PVK homepage, and the PVK modDB page.

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.

I was so ready to write this mod off as simply a fond memory when the news pipeline went dark several months ago. Fortunately for me, the Mario Kart Source developers have proven my extreme pessimism wrong by releasing some new screenshots and an assurance that they weren’t dead, just really busy. Phew.

It certainly looks like Mario Kart 64, except vastly improved in terms of the visual department. Block Fort, literally the greatest multiplayer arena released in the history of ever, looks utterly fantastic in the newly released screenshots. It seems to be shaping up nicely, even though there’s only screenshots for two racetracks and three battle maps.

Will it shape up to something good? Adapting something like Mario Kart to the PC means that as long as the karts move, it’ll still feel like Mario Kart. The physics had changed so much between each iteration of Mario Kart that whatever they do to the kart physics should work as long as it feels natural. So far it seems like they have a pretty good selection of courses, both done and planned. I mean, if they have Block Fort, they really can’t go wrong.

Now, if they added every Rainbow Road racecourse, then it might be the best Mario Kart game ever.

Here’s the official website with some interesting screenshots, and the ModDB page.

Ah, the humble forest. All you need to do is turn the lights down, sprinkle a few props around – a splash of blood across the path, an empty hut in a clearing glimpsed in the distance – and pretty soon you’ll have most players tearing their hair out and firing wildly into the trees at the slightest noise.

Seriously, though, it still takes some effort to make a setting work for you, which is one reason Left 4 Dead campaign Back To School would seem to be worth looking out for.

Modders 100_o/o_f@ke and romasm are clearly being careful not to fall back on tree-lined corridors, or just dotting an empty plain with foliage. There’s some striking level design going on here, keeping the naturalistic feel of Valve’s original game, with enough obvious care in the set dressing that it suggests they’ve got a good idea how to pace this stuff, too.

The campaign is being worked on in Left 4 Dead first, then being converted to the sequel at some later date. While they’re only a two-man team, they’ve been posting some detailed, professional-looking updates showing off their level construction and tweaks to the Source engine’s different systems, and all the media in these updates looks polished enough Back to School could well be worth the wait.

You can find the ModDB page for Back to School here.

So it seems that yet another venerated Half-Life 2 multiplayer mod has made the leap to the Orange Box engine, fancier graphics and eventual super-stardom. Well, probably only the first two. Dystopia is one of those fancy “team deathmatch as well as a bunch of other original game modes” kind of games, with a new update coming out September 10th (four days from now!).

It brings with it the usual bout of stuff that a Orange Box update comes with, namely the enhanced TF2 version of the engine, possible achievements/stat-tracking as well as a mountain of bug fixes, balance updates and a brand new map. It’s a rather impressively sized list of updates. The current news update doesn’t include the update list, but it does have a large amount of screenshots for the new map, titled Fusion.

For those of you that don’t know, Dystopia is a “cyberpunk themed total conversion of Half Life 2, created by an amature [sic] development team and released to the public for free.” It also happens to be a hard-to-explain game. Objectives are reached through the classic way of blowing everyone and everything up as well as hacking into the internets and blowing everyone and everything up. It’s like you’re playing on the internet whilst playing on the internet!

To sum it all up, the 1.3 update for Dystopia has all of the fanciness of the new Source engine. I’m looking forward to it even though I’ve played very little of the older version of it. So, Steam, September 10th.

Or, if you can’t wait, look at pretty pretty screenshots at the Dystopia website.

You can also get the jump on it by downloading the older version. It’ll update automatically once the new version comes out.

Everyone still wants to do the parkour, apparently. Or some kind of stylised, colourful urban obstacle course. We’ve had grappling hook racer Tension – no news from them in a while, I must try and follow that up – and now City Freerun, from modder Dosycool. Yes, it’s Mirror’s Edge in Source, there’s no getting away from that, but it looks like it could be a good attempt, and it’s coming along slowly but steadily so far.

The mod is set inside a simulator, apparently, with the surroundings becoming steadily more fully realised as the levels progress, something which does get it a bit closer to having its own identity. Knockoff or not, though, Dosycool has the aesthetic down pretty well. The visuals are hardly as crisp as DICE’s game, but they gain something from being simpler, looking weirdly like a Lego playset or the city as blank canvas in DeBlob.

To be honest, I almost like this more – I always felt Mirror’s Edge’s look was somewhat over-rated, with a lot of it seemingly just random splashes of primary colour all over the place. City Freerun – it’s a working title, don’t worry – is pretty rough around the edges in places but actually more polished in others.

It’s hard to get a handle on how this might play, given the video so far is mostly just running around, but consider me very interested.

You can find the ModDB page for City Freerun here.