Dire... dire, dire, dire.
Warmonger is a first person team-based shooter which sees you battling out against others in a variety of matches. So, take any FPS multiplayer you care to name, chuck it into CTF or TDM mode and you’ve got the idea… and trust me, this is the good news part of the review.The installation took so long to complete that at first I thought my machine had crashed and by the time it was done my eldest had completed a four year course at university and China had become the world leader in human rights.And the damn installer asked me to be patient! Once installed, I brushed the cobwebs off the keyboard, noted that mankind had evolved an extra pair of thumbs and settled down for some gaming fun, all enhanced by the Ageia PhysX card nestling in the gaming rig.
Click for larger imageAnd after two sessions of some 3 hours each, here I am writing the review because, believe me, just 30 minutes is more than enough time for even the most optimistic of players to have it thoroughly hammered into them that Warmonger is not a very good game. And by ‘not very good’ I mean Warmonger puts the capital P in poor.
I’m desperately trying to think of something nice to say about Warmonger and the best I can come up with it that it only asks you once if you really want to quit before instantly dropping back to the desktop and the front end looks and feels like any game from pre-2000... other than that it’s all bad. The weapons look suitably grimy and post-apocalypse futuristic but in use they all feel feeble and clumsy. Perhaps it’s the thin lines of bullet tracer that make it feel like I’m shooting hatpins at the enemy? The RPG feels a lot more like an RPG but has a limited area of effect and shows up Warmonger’s biggest flaw by far which is the totally crap clipping.
Click for larger imageFor those of you that don’t know, ‘clipping’ in games is about setting where the physical edge of an object actually is; be it a wall, a car, the ceiling, the enemy or basically anything that’s a solid object, clipping controls the edges of i. The idea is that it stops you walking through a wall or some other game-world solid object. Except with Warmonger it seems to randomly pick and choose what's solid and what's not. You’ve probably seen dodgy clipping before, where an enemy’s weapon disappears into a wall as he walks along… or perhaps parts of him show through a door or something similar. Well, Warmonger takes the ‘Clipping Guide for Dummies’, has a quick flick through to get the rough idea of how to do it, has a massive Alzheimer’s attack and treats most everything in the game as if it’s a cunningly created 3D illusion that has no physical existence in the game world.
I wouldn’t mind so much if they was some sort of logic to it all but there isn’t. This brick might look like that brick but you can’t walk through that one… However, enemies can walk through debris as if it’s mist, as can you, sometimes. Rockets explode whenever the edge of a wall is within, ooh, ten feet or so, making hiding around corners and popping out for a quick shot impossible as the 'edge' of the wall might be another few feet from where you think it is... or it might not. And anyway, that’s if you can see the enemy as entire bodies can be engulfed in a thick wall leaving just a bit of arse and shoulder sticking out with the entire character still vulnerable to fire. Enemies and your own team hover over the ground, never really looking as if they're 'there'. Watching them going up and down the smoothest of inclines is painful as they move up in a series of jerks that suggest they’re running up the side of some invisible Mayan temple steps… the list goes on and on.
Click for larger imageAnd how about weapon accuracy which is completely reliant on clipping? Well it often feels like you’re fighting a whole squad of Ace Rimmers as you need to be dead on to the enemy model to get a hit… well, most of the time you do because sometimes just waving the gun at them in a vaguely menacing fashion will have the same effect. The chain gun is possibly the most stupid weapon ever in a game with some daft super shield that makes you invulnerable but immobile or, if you go for running around, the whole thing has such stupid recoil that even if the clipping was spot on you’d have a hard time hitting the floor twice in ten shots.
And don’t get me started on the AI… If technophobes are worried about technology taking over the planet and killing us all, I can be pretty sure the AI won’t be from Warmonger. Well, unless the evil AI thinks the best way to wipe out mankind is to run towards us in a straight line, fire some random shots a couple of miles to the left, run into a corner whilst spinning around frantically before firing a rocket grenade at its own feet. And you thought the AI in Crysis drowning itself was daft? I’ve watched AI shoot delayed explosion dart grenades into a wall and then run to the very same wall where the grenade is to take cover… I’m seriously starting to wonder if the AI in Warmonger knows how bad the rest of the game is and is trying to commit digital suicide.
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