Hellforces Preview

When Buka games said “to hell with you,” they really meant it. Hell Forces is a typical FPS Zombie action thriller, except with a twist…well, there is no twist. The story in the game starts with a seemingly mysterious interrogation between law enforcement and your character (voiced by the same guy who did The Moment of Silence), who is being questioned about the disappearance of your crack addict ex-girlfriend. The interrogation then moves into a flashback of events of where you become playable. Using this “time-lantic” structure of events, the game is presented in a first person narrative interspersed with cut scenes that have a comic book sort of feel (Similar to Sin City ). The beta copy we obtained was single player and multiplayer, but the multiplayer was inoperable because it was a Beta.

When installing the game, I set all of the graphical settings on medium-high; based on what I'd seen of the pictures from the official site, it didn't look all that ground-breaking to begin with. Mistake one. As soon as the game began, my computer choked and the game ran slower than the Honda Civics the kids at my school race. Having an average “users” rig, I became curious to find out what was troubling my computer. So I put every setting on low and turned anti-aliasing off and managed to get some pretty decent frame rates. Hopefully more graphical options will be available in the final version, and maybe an automatic settings detector to tune the game to your rig's specs. While the game is “pretty,” it's certainly not “beautiful.” The textures are smooth and you can tell that a lot of preproduction visualization for concepts took place, but the game is not nearly as graphically complex as Half Life 2, Doom 3, or Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory.

The gameplay, unfortunately, feels bland, and while it may be too late to tune the engine differently, we can certainly hope for at least a more polished version when it hits shelves. The engines feels a little stiff; weapons have no virtual depth to them and even though there's a pretty wide variety of them, they all seem to feel the same: heavy and slow. Besides weapons, there is also an item function (which is pretty rare in most FPS games). We're not talking just health items, but also items with special abilities attached to them, from an item that makes you 1/3 your original size to a boom box for blaring tunes to the totally useless and cheesiest rip-off of the Matrix you'll ever see: The Trinity Glasses. Rather than helping you, the Trinity Glasses put a big screen of semi-transparent falling matrix code-like letters in front of you. Instead of making you feel cool and badass, it leaves you feeling embarrassed and cheap.

The levels or “maps,” I should say, are pretty long, and they require some coordination and an understanding of the game's physics to complete. Most of them do look pretty visually appealing, but again cannot compete with modern first-person shooters like Doom 3 and Half Life 2. The maps, though, play just like most other FPS. Instead of walking through a door, and then another, and then another, to complete the level, you'll have to find keycards to doors, hop from boxes to windows, crawl through sewers, etc. The gameplay is spread out and it will give the game a lot of playing time, but, unfortunately, all of it feels redundant, which creates frustration rather than admiration.

The main problem with Hell Forces is that it is too typical. It exhausts a formula that has been exhausted for far too long, and offers no apparent unique qualities to even set it apart from many “kill Zombies and make your way to the other side of the map” shooters. We received a beta copy, which signifies that it will be undergoing more development before it's done; we can always hope that a more polished version will address its flaws. Still, one can't help but wonder if the project itself is already too far gone to fix.

I tend to use words that don't actually exist so here are words used that you might not be familiar with:

“Time-lantic” – A structure concept of how events relate with actual time.