A freeware game using the Quake 3 engine, and you get alot more fun for buyying Quake 3 for a budget
- Its Free
The Bad:
- Poor AI
- Few things to do
- Extremly lackluster weapons
- Very Blocky/Few Polygons
- Very simple textures
- Empty Servers
Recently, a game called Alien Arena has been released as Freeware. The game already had some potential for it due to the fact that it uses the Quake 3 engine it-self or infact the whole sorce code.
But Alien Arena 2006 fails to deliver everything. If there was one place that it suceeds, it is the strange way that this game completly seperates itself from others. It does this by simply discarding what other First Person Shooters have and makes up its own. This is mainly done in the sense of the wacky weapons that vary from your defult gun which u can fire slow movving powerful balls or alt fire with fast beams (like the Unreal Tournament Shock Rife) to the gun that can fire out thease crazy blasts of electric.
However this mainly makes for a realy unbalanced game. if your a good player at shooters all you realy need to do is use the alt fire of your standered gun. Aparently there is a spin-off to the rail gun. Which shoots out blasts of heat in a straight line but can not kill in one hit. Seems pointless with its large delay. Dont worry, once you die you can get straight back into the action and well... die again. Yes there is no spawn protection, this also gives a crazy idea of using the flamethrower to double kill someone if they respawn where you killed them.
Well at least you might have some fun trying to play with other people right? Well if your planning to do this by the interent then think again. The browsers is almost always empty with maybe one or two people on. Servers may have some people playying but they are all bots. If you want to play by yourself you can somehow navigate through the games awful menu, click single player and then choose easy, medium or hard and your off. There are no tourneys to pick and no choices. It's just a linear path to the end after winning one round to go to the next whilst fighting totally unbalanced and poor AI.
The AI is so poor that infact you will encounter the same routine with different people. For example AI "X" will run up to you, jump up and down whilst firring at you. Dont worry Computer AI "Y" will always move left to right and fire at you. Not to mention that Computer "Z" will always win against the other AI when in a game.
The least you can do is admire the games blocky and simplistic graphics. The graphics look like they came from Quake 2 only more colorful. If the dull graphics gets you down you can atleast have the totally distracting swirling lights bring the arena to life because it gives it an "Alien" feel but it gets in the way soo much you have to turn it off and be in dull city. Maybe the sounds of a 1990's old consle generation games will cheer you up.
Alien Arena 2006: altough its a free game it is realy crap. If you want to go find a game that uses Quake 3 source code or just want a nice cheap game, then get Quake 3 itself for a small fee from the bargain bin for 5x more fun or even better find another freeware game that is worth your time.