The gameplay loop feels familiar to anyone who’s enjoyed those classic PC bloodbaths, including that fantastically smooth movement, enemy variety to mix and match many scenarios, secret walls packed with goodies and hidden monster closets to surprise you. STRAFE sticks surprisingly close to the source material in some very key ways, but falls more flat in others.

STRAFE has a limited pool of weapons to arm yourself with at the start, with a shotgun, automatic rifle and a rail gun. All are functional but lack the imagination held by the games inspiration. Upon grabbing one and making your way into the depths of the randomly generated Icarus space station to wade through the legions of enemies you might find the occasional alternate weapon, with some fun effects, to use for a time until the ammo runs dry.

"The gameplay loop feels familiar to anyone who’s enjoyed those classic PC bloodbaths, including that fantastically smooth movement, enemy variety to mix and match many scenarios, secret walls packed with goodies and hidden monster closets to surprise you."

Weapon mod pickups litter the stages and boost the effectiveness of your arms, but never drastically change their function. Each weapon has an alt fire that expends a lot of ammo in exchange for a quick exit from a bad situation, for example the rifle firing a grenade. Dispersed sparingly throughout the levels are machines to trade in acquired scrap currency to replenish your shields or ammo. The scarcity of the machines and pickups create tension and interesting player decisions where you don’t know when the next machine will be, but perhaps you’ll have saved up enough for the life saving ammo by then.

If you manage to survive until the end of the stage, you’re greeted with stats not dissimilar to classic DOOM, taunting you about your completion percentage and how much of the level you uncovered. Secrets are hidden around every corner, but also traps. You’re encouraged to seek them out for the possible benefit they bring to the run, but the possibility of it being a monster closet is always in the back of your mind. With so little health hanging around, I never felt that the reward was worth the risk and rarely sought them out, choosing to simply survive.

Fantastically implemented orthogonal enemy design in DOOM helped create readable situations that the player could appropriately react to, and while STRAFE tries to emulate that it doesn’t fit together quite as nice. The primary enemies you’ll be dealing with are little mutants who hobble into melee range and can easily dog pile a reckless player, encouraging players stay on the move, while others show up less infrequently but don’t differentiate themselves to the degree they probably should have.

"The combat and gameplay loop is asking me to get reckless and take foes head on, but the non-permanence of the game and scarcity of health pickups asks me to be careful."

Most of the enemy types have a variation of “pursue and fire projectile weapon” as their standard game plan, which doesn’t really flex the players ability to adapt to different situations, so much as repeatedly come up with a fresh solution to the same problem. Given the random nature of the game, it would be silly to include a bunch of enemies with hitscan weapons that would just punish the player for being seen, but the current lineup doesn’t offer much in the way of interesting combat.

In all, i’m not sure how well the Rougelike elements mix the style of combat STRAFE goes for. The first person perspective was occasionally limiting and I was caught off guard back peddling into a mob or some randomly generated fire on more than one occasion, and frequently met my end without really feeling like I had control over the situation. The combat and gameplay loop is asking me to get reckless and take foes head on, but the non-permanence of the game and scarcity of health pickups asks me to be careful. I feel like a balance could have been reached by taking a leaf from DOOM 4 and rewarding health for skillful play, but that was not a direction they went in.

Effort was clearly spent with making the presentation pop with a fantastic 90’s flair and style, in a cohesiveness that isn’t often seen. The boxy models and environments thankfully don’t clash with a smooth gameplay experience and feel entirely like something lifted right off the PS1. Things are immediately identifiable, when you see them to begin with, and employ a wider colour palette to separate the enemies from the environment in service to the gameplay.

"Death screens taunt you with how you died, how much scrap you had and how much viscera you left around the space station."

Death screens taunt you with how you died, how much scrap you had and how much viscera you left around the space station. Visually it all pops with a nostalgic touch that modernizes in the right places to feel like a chosen style, and not lazy design.

Sound design wasn’t handled quite so well, with limp sound effects limiting how punchy the weapons feel and a backing of the most generic techno i’ve probably ever heard didn’t get my blood pumping like that thrashing guitar of DOOM or Quake. Enemies barely make a sound outside shooting, leaving sight as your only indication of where they might be. Your avatar barely reacts to being hit and doesn’t give off an indication of where the damage came from, frequently leaving me scrambling for the location of my assailant.

There is fun to be had, but STRAFE is more than a little schizophrenic and divisive, and i’m not completely sure if the marriage between the Rougelike and the classic shooter is a completely sound one, or at least as its presented in this game. It’s cohesive vision for its presentation brings a competently, if not magically put together game to life enough to get a lot of enjoyment from wandering the halls of Icarus.

This game was reviewed on PC.

It may have been a while since Doom designer John Romero made a decent game but his announcement of a new FPS is still significant. Of course, given all the first person shooters that release each year, hasn’t the genre been played out by now? There’s also the belief that Romero has already done enough shooters. What else is left?

Plenty, according to the man himself in conversation with Develop. “There are unbelievable amounts of new stuff to do in that genre. The idea of a shooter is running around with weapons, in first-person, blowing things away. But what are you really doing? What is the world like? Who are you, and what do you care about? What are you doing in the world that’s different?

He took World of Warcraft as example, and talked about what the result would be if shooter elements were added. “You have a giant world full of quests, and tons of people with PvP already in the game. If World of Warcraft was a shooter, that would be brand new – nobody would have seen something that big and that cool.”

A better example of such a game model would probably be Team Fortress 2. “Perhaps villages would become like TF2 levels, where you would try to score as much as you could before deciding to move on. Or that area would have specific goals, like taking out five snipers and two demo guys to retrieve some key items. Perhaps once you’ve exhausted that village, you could go to another one down the road. And maybe the planet’s full of them – nobody’s played a game like that.”

Romero also wants to see developers try something new in the genre. “Shooters have so many places to go, but people just copy the same thing over and over because they’re afraid to try something new. We’ve barely scratched the surface.”

Hopefully this won’t be the second time Romero has talked about trying something new and falling well short of expectations. Stay tuned for more details.

Players of EA’s popular first person shooter, Battlefield 4, have un-covered yet another glitch in the game. The glitch allows for the combination of character classes and load-outs by taking advantage of the games brief player spawn period.

In the video above, we see the player combine both the Engineer Class and the Support Class, this gives the player access to combinations of equipment that are (under normal circumstances) not equipable by select classes. The Engineer Class brings the anti-personnel/ anti-vehicular rocket launcher whereas the Support Class has access to the ammo bag. This effectively grants the player an unlimited supply of rockets.

In order to perform the glitch, players must go to their Class selection screen and navigate to the Gadget section. Select a Gadget slot and equip the preferred item whilst leaving the other slot empty, then switch to another player class and choose the opposing Gadget slot and fill it with the preferred item. When you press the spawn button, simply hit R1 and L1 buttons to spawn with a hybrid class that fields previously impossible load-outs.

This is the most recent glitch discovered in Battlefield 4 which has been named by some, as the most bug and glitch ridden games to be released on 8th generation hardware. One previous glitch involved bodies acting as shields against all manners of explosive and conventional weapons, so long as the player stood behind a corpse.

This glitch is expected to be patched soon, so if you want to toy around with it you best be quick!

Running on the internally developed Anvil video game engine (amplified by Realblast Destruction), Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six: Siege will be launching on the Xbox One, PlayStation 4 and Microsoft Windows and is slated to be released at some time in 2015. The game will be available at retail and via digital download, the Microsoft Windows of the game will most likely require activation via Uplay.

• 1. Development
• 2. Story
• 3. Gameplay
• 4. Classes

Development

Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six: Siege is a first person shooter video game that takes the expected mechanics of the previous Rainbow Six games and refines them and improves upon them to bring a new gameplay experience to the player. To that end, Ubisoft Montreal is using their internally developed Anvil engine that is being bolstered by the Realblast Destruction engine.

This combination of video game engines allows the game world to suffer considerable damage and thus change how player will be forced to interact with each other. In the games announcement gameplay trailer we see a player shoot out a portion of drywall to clear a line of sight for their team mate situated across the street with a sniper rifle.

Seemingly taking a note from the Battlefield franchise, Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six: Siege has a focus on destruction, with a Ubiblog post saying “The attackers vs defenders idea can be boiled down to destruction vs fortification. While the defenders are reinforcing walls and floors and laying down traps, the attackers will be scouting ahead and using teamwork to blast these best-laid plans to hell.”

The post goes on to further emphasise the importance of destruction mechanics in the game, stressing that they aren’t merely an aesthetic touch, but a pivotal part of the overall gameplay experience. An excerpt reads, “Destruction is at the center of our experience and it certainly brings brand new tactical advantages to the franchise,” Witts explains. “No longer are players confined to breaching doors and windows to get the drop on enemies. Observe weak points in enemy defenses and breach through walls and floors to exploit them. The Realblast destruction engine is at the center of the Siege gameplay experience and enhances the tactical play that Rainbow fans know and love.”

Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six: Siege is actually a replacement game. Originally, Ubisoft was developing a tactical shooter in the Rainbow Six canon that was to be called Rainbow Six Patriots and featured many of the classic Rainbow Six manoeuvres such as inverted rappelling and team breaching. The game was a considerable way into its development with images, screenshots and magazine coverage having come out.

But despite this, the game was scrapped and Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six: Siege took its place. It was announced that the title was scrapped because it didn’t feel “next-gen” enough, but elaborating on this in a Ubiblog post, we’ve been told the following, “And now the question we know a lot of you are asking: What happened to Rainbow Six Patriots, the game we showed off a few years ago at E3? The short answer: It just didn’t cut it for the new generation. When the new hardware was announced, the decision was made to reboot Rainbow Six with a new team at the helm and a new goal of taking full advantage of what the next generation had to offer. The focus on siege and destruction technology this group envisioned was incompatible with the direction Patriots had taken and the project was ultimately cancelled, making way for something even bigger and better.”

Story

Thus far, it’s unknown whether or not the game will have a narrative structure in the traditional sense.

Gameplay

At time of writing we’ve seen Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six: Siege gameplay footage show the return of the traditional Rainbow Six gameplay mechanics that includes precision aiming, suppressing enemy forces and team breaching manoeuvres to name but the core mechanics.

The game has a heavy multiplayer focus that forces players into a competitive situation that (thus far) includes a team death match styled hostage rescue scenario that see’s the Rainbow Team invade a locale that is being defended by the opposing force.

The Rainbow Team was shown to breach the home of a hostage from the roof after arriving via helicopter drop. They then proceed to rappel and breach the windows (as is the series iconic incursion tactic) before collectively dispatching an opponent with concentrated fire. From here on we can see the players deploying bulletproof riot shields for mobile cover (at the cost of a two handed weapon being replaced by a pistol) whereas the opposing players barricade doors and block of hallways to deny access to the Rainbow Team.

Players can now also strategically breach according to their own plan, this includes a vertical breach that allows a hole to be blown in the floor, allowing ingress into the room beneath. This was mostly likely inspired by the vertical breach performed by Sam Fisher in Splinter Cell Blacklist (private estate mission), which was another Ubisoft Montreal developed game.

Classes

Rainbow Six doesn’t normally use the traditional class system, players instead create a custom load out allowing them to fulfil a specific role within in the team that they’re operating with. Thus far, we are yet to see any class based system, though it is unlikely one will emerge.

Note: This wiki will be updated once we have more information about the game.

The game, which was published by Bethesda Softworks, is running on id Tech 5, a powerful video game engine being used on both 7th and 8th gen hardware. To that end, the title seen a cross generational and cross platform release, arriving on the Xbox 360, Xbox One, PS3, PS4 and PC when it launched in May 2014 and was made available at retail and via digital download.

• 1. Development
• 2. Story
• 3. Gameplay

Development

MachineGames was rumored to be are working on a new game that would be using the id Tech 5 engine. After a few teases, it was eventually revealed to be Wolfenstein: The New Order. Jens Matthies, creative director at MachineGames stated in an interview, ” We are excited to bring a new chapter of Wolfenstein to gamers everywhere, as fans of the series, working on this game is an honor, and our team is driven to create an unforgettable action-adventure experience that will make FPS fans proud”. [reference]

The game will not feature multiplayer, as Jens Matthies stated that,” “It’s such a huge part of video game legacy. If there’s a video game museum, Wolfenstein is in the first room. It’s the start of the wave that shaped the world of gaming. On a personal level, I played this when I was younger and it was mind-blowing. I never then of course dreamed that I was going to be working with it. It’s both an honor and a legacy.” [reference]

Story

The game is being re-imagined in an alternate world where the Nazis actually win World War II and achieve world domination. Due to a highly sensitive mission gone wrong during the American war, the protagonist B.J Blazkowicz is injured and comatose for 14 years. Due to the mental state he is in, he is sent to an asylum. However the Nazis arrive at the asylum, with the purpose of killing everyone there.

This somehow triggers Blazkowicz’s memory, and he escapes with the help of a nurse named Anya. As the two disembark on their adventure they meet a whole slew of interesting characters, and eventually, Blazkowicz embarks on an “impossible mission” to defeat the Third Reich. Hitler is rumoured be showing up in the game but in what shape and form hasn’t been revealed yet.

Gameplay

Gameplay will be a throwback to the old Wolfenstein games, though there will be turrent sequences and melee kills included. The player will be able to  break into secret research facilities and heavily guarded weapon stashes and upgrade various weapons.

Enemies include over-sized Nazi robots, Super Soldiers, Elite Shock Troops, and robot dogs. This is coupled with intense mountain-top car chases, underwater exploration, player-controlled Nazi war machines and more. The developers kept the tradition of the 100 Health Points limit. Regenerating health is included, but will only regenerate health up to 20 HP.

Dual wielding machine guns will be possible. Along with traditional handguns and shotguns, there will be the laser cutter, a device that can burn through almost anything (and gets upgraded to the free-form Laserkraftwerk).

This wiki was last updated on 5th, January 2015. 

Alien Rage was previously known as Alien Fear but has recently gone under a name change. City Interactive has announced the new name today and has released a teaser trailer along with screenshots for the new downloadable PC, PlayStation Network and Xbox Live Arcade title. The game will be playable for the first-time at this year’s E3 and will be coming out this fall.

The game is using the ever-popular Unreal Engine 3 and packs in stylish beautiful graphics all around. Alien Rage is described as a “hardcore Sci-Fi shooter,” with “the DNA of the best classical FPS games.” One of the biggest features the game has are the variety of weapons and firing modes.  Alien Rage will also feature co-op and 21 types of enemies “including 8 bad-ass bosses.”

Screenshots:

The game looks beautiful in my opinion and I am looking forward to trying it out.

Let us know if Alien Rage has intrigued your interest in the comments below.

Check back on GamingBolt for more media and gameplay updates for Alien Rage as we get closer to E3 2013.

Hellraid is the next upcoming title from Techland, the creators behind critically acclaimed co-operative online first person shooter Dead Island. First new pieces of information of Hellraid has been revealed to Eurogamer’s Polish site.

Hellraid is themed as a horror/fantasy-style first-person RPG that will be utilizing Techland’s Chrome Engine 5 to achieve melee and spell-based combat. In Hellraid players will be fighting against the good old skeletons, demons, and other scary things that we all can imagine from a horror themed medieval game.

The game will be similar to Dead Island in terms of having four different playable characters that team up to take down the denizens of hell. However, the developer refers to these four adventures as classes rather than story characters. The four playable class Paladin, Mage, Rogue and of course the Warrior.

Check out the trailer below:

Techland says that the game is heavily influenced by old-school first person shooter games like “the first Quake, [and the] second Hexen or Diablo,” according to producer Marcin Kruczkiewicz. Also, Hellraid world will be more narrow rather open like Dead Island, the leveling and experience system will be more refined and simpler, skill tress will unlock as characters level up.

Techland is currently looking for a publisher for the title and expects to release the game on Xbox 360, PS3 and PC later this year.

Fuse will not require an online pass according to Insomniac Games, the developers of Fuse and previous franchises like Ratchet and Clank and Resistance on the PlayStation 3.

Inomniac Games recently posted a FAQ on their website and the answer to the question “Online pass?” reads: “Nope. But, you should still buy it new to support us because there are no microtransactions to make up for it, though.”

It’s not surprising for an EA Partners game to skip the online pass system. Crysis 3 offers multiplayer without the need to actually buy the game brand new.

Fuse will be coming out on May 31st for PlayStation 3 and Xbxox 360, with a demo following up near the launch of the game.

Check back GamingBolt for the full review of Fuse when it launches later this year on May 31st for the current generation consoles.

Source – Insomniac Games

niper Ghost Warrior 2 is a first-person shooter game that focuses on the simulation of what it is like to be a realistic sniper that runs on the CryEngine 3. If you like sniping and and enjoy sneaking around then this might be a game for you. However, the game isn’t as realistic as you might expect it to be due to numerous problems it has. I will be explaining the game’s high and low points, but first lets cover the presentation of the game.

Presentation:

Sniper Ghost Warrior 2 is a decent looking game, but it could have been so much more better looking. It’s running on Crytek’s CryEngine 3 which is the powerhouse behind the graphical behemoth Crysis 3. Crysis 3 really took the advantage of the engine, however, Sniper Ghost Warrior 2 does not.

It looks good, but it’s nowhere near the beauty of Crysis 3, even though it’s running on the same engine. I kind of find this rather disappointing because the developers had great potential to make this a beautiful looking game. It’s a sniping and sneaking game at heart and it’s not even open world like Far Cry 3, this really baffles me why the developers have gone the low quality route on this one.

Sniper Ghost Warrior 2 is also filled with graphical glitches, such as skybox flickering, repeatable textures that are used way too much, noticeable texture pop-ins that are easy to see and sometimes disappearing corpses after shooting them down with your trustworthy pistol.

While these graphical glitches don’t happen that often, they’re still noticeable and can distract the player from the main experience and ruin the immersion of realism. However, there are times when Sniper Ghost Warrior 2 does look pretty, especially when you look at something from a distance. Overall the presentation of the game is actually decent. There is a nice soundtrack when combat kicks in, great voice acting and good looking character models.

Gameplay and Structure:

The gameplay in Sniper Ghost Warrior 2 is usually divided into three elements, which are sneaking and sniping throughout the missions. In the game you will be sneaking past enemies, taking out enemy snipers from long distances, killing main targets and covering your AI partners in certain mission scenarios. The sniping mechanics are well implemented and easy to understand. You zoom in on your sniper rifle and wait for a few seconds too see a tiny red circle appear. This actually indicates where the bullet will land. The game takes into account the wind direction, heartbeat rate and distance which determines where your bullet will actually land. Once you think you’re ready to take the shot, you can hold down shift to take a deep-breath and makes the world go into slow-motion so you can properly aim your shot and then push the trigger.

The game has 3 difficulty settings, easy, normal and hard. Playing easy and normal will still make the small red circle appear when you zoom in with your sniper rifle, while the hard difficulty completely relies on your sniping intuition and skills. The game consists of 3 Acts with 3 missions in each act. The missions usually range from 20-30 minutes depending on how fast you snipe and sneak around. There are also secret collectibles that you can collect. If you’re into collecting and completing the Acts 100%, then the game will obviously become longer due to the exploration aspect.

Your sniper is also equipped with a knife, pistol with an attached silencer. You may also use binoculars to locate hard to see targets in the distance, thermal vision and night vision for missions in the dark. The pistol is useful for the sneaking parts of the game and can also help you out of sticky situations if the enemies decide to charge and gun you down. The game makes clever use of binoculars and other gadgets during your snipe hunt.

The AI in the game is not that smart which is disappointing, because this is supposed to be a realistic sniping experience. When the AI gets alerted they either run straight to you, or go behind cover and not even try to shoot you until you kill them with a pistol or snipe them down. This makes the game really easy, I was able to get through most of the missions just by killing everyone with a pistol and didn’t even need to use my sniper.

One thing that I do like about Sniper Ghost Warrior 2 is the bullet cam. When you snipe down the last guy in the zone, the final hit is beautifully demonstrated in a slow-motion movement and the feeling of the impact when the bullet hits someone’s face. It’s fun to see and adds a cinematic feel to the game thanks to the camera angles. Players may also turn the bullet cam feature off in the options menu if they don’t like it.

Overall the pacing of the game is decent. I just wish there was a bit more sniping in the game and less areas where you can just sneak past enemies or even gun them down if you want to put your sniper rifle to use. The actual sniping is fun and feels good when you start popping enemies heads one by one. The dumb AI doesn’t help the game at all and makes it unrealistic which is a shame. Graphical glitches that I’ve mentioned earlier can also break the immersion during sniping sections. The game is also very linear, it tries hard to make you think that it’s open world. However, in reality its far from it and you just follow objectives until your done with the mission.

Multiplayer:

Sniper Ghost Warrior 2 has a 12 player multiplayer. You can create/join a server or host a LAN party if you wish. Looking  for multiplayer games, I was able to see 2 servers in the Server Browser, which indicates that the multiplayer in this game is not that popular. After about an hour of sniping in online session I became super bored. The pace of the game is way to slow for me and its just wasn’t that fun overall.

The game only included Team Deathmatch mode and 2 maps for the online play and nothing else. Not only was the multiplayer experience not that fun, but it was also lacking in content. Majority of gamers are used to having multiple game modes  to choose from. If you’re looking for a good multiplayer sniping experience then you’re not going to find it here.

Overall

Sniper Ghost Warrior 2 is a decent game but it has too many issues. The game’s biggest problem is the AI. The game is advertised as a realistic sniping experience and the AI doesn’t complement that in any way whatsoever. While the game is powered up by CryEngine 3 it definitely does look pretty in certain places, but nowhere near the quality of other CryEngine 3 powered games. The graphical texture pop-ins, overused repeatable textures and flickering skyboxes don’t help the game either. Bullet cam and actual sniping is decent, but not amazing. Thankfully the game is $30, so if you’re looking for a quick sniper fix then buy it.

If you have friends that are looking for a varied multiplayer experience then look elsewhere. There are plenty of other first-person shooter games with fantastic multiplayer content out on the market. Overall it’s not a horrible game by any means, I just think it wasn’t executed as well as it could be. Hopefully a future sequel (if there ever will be one) will address the main issues and make the game better.

This game was reviewed on the PC.

There are a lot of big ones coming up next year. Crysis 3, XCOM, Bioshock Infinite and most likely the next installment in the Call of Duty series. Anyways, enough of the chit chat. Check out the entire list of first person shooters hitting next year on all possible platforms.

Have something to say? Let us know in the comments section below.

Stay tuned to GamingBolt for more news, exciting features and updates.