14 DAY TRIAL // What is a new first-person shooter without a catchy name? The latest Blood Frontier game stirs the curiosity of its players by using this original title and by offering some new and interesting gaming features that most of the time come with a price tag and not for free.
If you still haven't noticed yet, Blood Frontier is an open source project, meaning that everyone can help fix bugs and report malfunctions. In the end, this can prove to be a great thing, because when the project will be fully completed and not in the Alpha stage, as it is now, it will probably be a successful and highly downloaded game. The developing team is composed of people from all across the world that each bring a small contribution to the title, whether it's in the form of testing it or writing code lines.
Just like any other game, it comes with a background story where, in the distant future, when the human race will have conquered most planets from our solar system, the gamer will be an android that manages to survive a strange plague. I have to admit, the storyline isn't that amazing, but I guess that it doesn't even have to be so, as long as most people play this type of games for the multiplayer satisfaction and live opponent shootouts.
The graphical engine behind the title moves pretty well, although a little more attention to texture rendering might not be such a bad idea. Within the gameplay, you get a descent framerate on both high and low resolution, and even when there is a lot of environmental texture, you don't freeze up. This is a very important aspect to take into consideration because in Online multiplayer mode, whenever there is a gathering of more that five to ten characters, you will be able to move without a glitch and target either one of them with ease.
What I have found interesting about the game has been the environmental gravity. With a simple press of the spacebar you will notice that, as opposed to any average title, you will jump higher and even fall from tall buildings without suffering too much damage, if at all. This is both a pro and a con, mostly because when in the air you cannot control the player as well as on solid ground, and a FPS is all about moving fast in any direction, away from the bullets.
If I were to comment upon the game's weapons, I would have to say that there is nothing new besides the classical flame thrower, shotgun, grenade and the machine gun. The only arm that I am pleased to say has impressed me, has been the sniper. Regardless of the one hit kill feature, whenever you press the right mouse button, the zooming feature is enabled. What's so special about it is that you can move the target within the area covered by the sniper's scope, giving you full control to change the position of the targeting cursor wherever you want inside the said range. At the same time, you can circulate across the map and modify your target accordingly, without exiting the zooming mode.
Another impressive characteristic of the game consists of the wide range of options that you can configure from the Options menu. Any single feature that you want changed can be modified from here in a heartbeat. Even the bots can be added and set to a preferred difficulty level with the uttermost ease. Nothing stands between you and choosing the desired screen resolution, or configuring other advanced rendering options.
Last but not least, the AI is not as dumb as I initially expected it to be. Actually, if you set it to normal level rather than nightmare, you will find it to be as challenging as a real live opponent. It chooses its rally points based on a carefully designed algorithm, and it is not always easy to take it down. It also knows how to make use of all the weapons, and I didn't observe a particular preference for a specific arm model. It knows how to use all of them, and rather well if I may say so.
Setting a conclusion to all of this, my personal opinion is that Blood Frontier is more than a decent game that comes with a pretty good conceived idea of how an FPS should be. It's dynamic and multiplayer-oriented, which makes it a perfect candidate to both LAN and Online parties. Apart the large amount of audio and video settings that can be configured, the game does not need a too advanced hardware support to perform at its best. My considered viewpoint is that, even in the case of a computer with low resources, you can still play the title without getting annoyed by dropping framerates or by not meeting the graphical rendering requirements.
With Blood Frontier shooting has never been easier, and no matter how you put it, after the first 10 minutes of gameplay, you get hooked on the adrenaline rush of playing with live opponents, and lots of the previously stated features won't even matter.
Here are some snapshots of the application in action:
