THE ICARUS (Strogg personal jetpack) IS THE COOLEST THING EVER. I cannot stop flying that thing; it’s a TON of fun. The game overall is quite fun. The different classes allow for multiple ways of playing the game. The vehicles are pretty cool and add a nice touch to the game. There’s usually plenty of them, so you don’t end up having to wait a long time. The objectives are fun, though get a little dull after several hours (it’s beta, there’s only one map; that’s to be expected). I like the fact that the scoreboard only shows your XP (points) and not your kills/deaths. I found that this made me far more relaxed in the game (I get angry in games VERY EASILY). I didn’t necessarily care how MANY kills or deaths I had, rather, I was more concerned THAT I was getting kills and completing objectives. For the record, I finished most games at the top.

Now for the bad: Surprisingly, the graphics are pretty disappointing. Unless you have 16x filtering on, the ground textures look like shit up close. The animations appear to be capped at 30fps, which makes the game look somewhat choppy and not smooth like the Quake 3 engine was. The massive landscape looks nice (though the trees look shitty), but really adds very little to the game, as the battles are concentrated to a small(er) area. The explosions are pretty damn dull, too, although some look decent. The sounds for most GDF weapons are RUBBISH, and I sincerely hope they are placeholders for other sounds in the final game. Seriously, one of the guns sounds like someone spitting into a microphone.

The GDF anti-vehicle/anti-air missles pretty much kill you right on the spot, with little or no chance to dodge (unless you’re craft on the jetpack), which is pretty annoying. There isn’t anything such as a flare like in Battlefield 2.

While the emphasis seems to be on teamplay, it seems to me like there are very few conventions to make this style of gameplay convenient. You can opt to join a “firesquad” at the start of the map (via a very amateurish “Would you like to join a firesquad? F1 Yes F2 No” style prompt), but there doesn’t appear to be any rhyme or reason to it. I didn’t find any way to switch squads or choose a specific squad, and there didn’t appear to be any form of squad management, such as assigning objectives and marking the map. The biggest thing that’s missing for teamplay is voice chat. It’s 2007; how could a game like this not have voice chat? I hope this is just something absent from the beta and intended for the final version.

Overall, it’s a very fun game. Despite the disappointing sound and graphics, I played for several hours straight and had an excellent time. I’m hoping some of these issues will be ironed out by the time the game is released (next month, I believe), but I’m afraid it will be more of a release now, patch later situation. Regardless, I’ll definitely be there to pick this game up the day it comes out.