Getting a fair amount of press since a strong showing at E3 last year, Pariah is the latest FPS from Digital Extremes, who created the original Unreal Tournament and have been involved throughout the Unreal series.
The multiplayer demo's out now, and it's pretty solid, if not spectacular. Graphically, it's top stuff, the demo maps being pretty huge and sprawling and the engine handling lots of people, vehicles and weapon effects being thrown about the place. There's some nice effects, such as the way the background zooms out a little as you take off in one of the vehicles, or the way using the Plasma rifle distorts your view (not totally clear on why, but it looks neat).
Gameplay wise, it's fairly predictable FPS stuff. The weapons are big and meaty and fairly satisfying to use, but nothing that new. It's a little harder than your average FPS, with fairly aggressive view bobbing with movement and the like and the weapons generally requiring more accuracy than usual to be effective. Weapon choice works along a character class system, and there's no straight deathmatch, only Team DM, so in theory with some balanced teams games could be pretty interesting.
Didn't try Capture the Flag, but I guess that'll be fairly standard. Frontline Assault is rather like Frontline Force, an old Half-Life mod, insofar as you have a big map with command points and the objective is to capture each successive command point, pushing forward from one to the next. Again, it's fine and enjoyable, but nothing new.
The main interest in the demo though is seeing how spectacular it looks and feels, and it is clearly a technically excellent game, if not quite up to the spectacle of Half-Life 2. That comparison aside, there's enough here to suggest that if the single player comes off, Pariah could be worth checking out.
The multiplayer demo's out now, and it's pretty solid, if not spectacular. Graphically, it's top stuff, the demo maps being pretty huge and sprawling and the engine handling lots of people, vehicles and weapon effects being thrown about the place. There's some nice effects, such as the way the background zooms out a little as you take off in one of the vehicles, or the way using the Plasma rifle distorts your view (not totally clear on why, but it looks neat).
Gameplay wise, it's fairly predictable FPS stuff. The weapons are big and meaty and fairly satisfying to use, but nothing that new. It's a little harder than your average FPS, with fairly aggressive view bobbing with movement and the like and the weapons generally requiring more accuracy than usual to be effective. Weapon choice works along a character class system, and there's no straight deathmatch, only Team DM, so in theory with some balanced teams games could be pretty interesting.
Didn't try Capture the Flag, but I guess that'll be fairly standard. Frontline Assault is rather like Frontline Force, an old Half-Life mod, insofar as you have a big map with command points and the objective is to capture each successive command point, pushing forward from one to the next. Again, it's fine and enjoyable, but nothing new.
The main interest in the demo though is seeing how spectacular it looks and feels, and it is clearly a technically excellent game, if not quite up to the spectacle of Half-Life 2. That comparison aside, there's enough here to suggest that if the single player comes off, Pariah could be worth checking out.
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