Intelligent Game Reviews

You’ve seen the ads like the picture above. No doubt the males among you have paused, gazed at the attractive young lady dressed only in a tear and tattoo and wondered if she’s in the game. No, not at all… nothing like here there to see. What is in the game is a serious bit of eye candy that could well be called Descent III except it’s written by someone else and the name’s been taken anyhow. So, if you can pardon the exceptionally misleading, but at least not completely gory, advertising read on!

The Story

What little story there is in Forsaken goes something like this… some college freshman science project went awry and the Earth was pretty much sent to hell in a hand basket. It seems a fusion reaction or something very like it wiped out the inhabitants. So, the galactic government has said the planet is now “free game” for anyone with the cajones to try to find anything of value. Naturally this has attracted the galaxy’s seediest element… including you! A bit of looting, a bit of fighting, all in the name of fun and profit. What could be better than that?

Game Play

Forsaken is a game that uses movement in three dimensions. Your typical shooter is essentially two dimensional. You can run around in the X-Y plane, and maybe crouch or jump in the Z plane but little else. Not so in Forsaken! You are free to move simultaneously in all three directions. Thus you can be moving forward and sliding up and to the left. Movement in each dimension is separately controlled… and takes a bit of getting used to.

You generally are flying around in tunnels of various types. True, they might be called a subway, or power plant, or temple, but they are really just gussied up tunnels. If you can keep yourself from bumping into the walls all the time you get to fight with various different enemies. These take the form of automated defenses left over from the cataclysm that engulfed Earth as well as other bounty hunters after the same goodies you are. The defenses are both static and mobile. Guns and turrets can be found all over, there are mines to avoid, flame throwers and all sorts of nastiness. Robots roam about, although they generally don’t move from their home location. Indeed, they spawn in reaction to your presence rather than being there all the time.

To help you along the way you can find gold bars and crystals to give you extra “lives”. You’ll also find a host of power-ups: weapons, weapon upgrades, mines, shields, and ammunition. There are a wide variety of these, all with their very own devilishly useful traits and sexy graphical glitter.

There are some nifty extra features that can come in handy. One is a “rear view camera” display. This allows you to see if anything is sneaking up behind you. You’ll want to use it, robots tend to spawn behind you when you enter rooms. How annoying! You also have a missile camera which allows you to see if that Solaris tracking missile found it’s target or not.

You can save the game at any point, but be warned save games can be pretty big, more than a megabyte each. As you move around you’ll also trigger “restart points” where you will come back to life should you have the misfortune to cash in your chips. On the whole the save and restore features worked well.

For each game you can choose your vehicle. Each has a different set up, both in terms of its look and in its capabilities. Each is rated for speed, maneuverability, hull strength and shielding. Which you choose certainly does have an impact on your play style. With a fast but lightly defended bike you’d better be awful good at shooting on the run. With the slower bikes you’d best be sure to have a good aim, as you are a ripe target for everyone else at your slow speed.

One final thing to note is the ability to make recordings. You can record the action to make movies of your exploits and then replay it at variable speeds. This comes in most handy in multiplayer games (see below) where you can not only see what you did, but also watch from the perspective of any other player! Now that is cool. It allows you to study the moves of someone who was really doing well to see how she did it so that you can maybe pull something clever next time you meet.

The Levels

There are 15 levels, most of which are of goodly size. Some are timed, in that you need to find the exit before time runs out or “boom, so sorry, you are dead.” Reminiscent of anything? Most however are not timed, just filled to the rim with bad guys intent on doing you bodily harm and some puzzles to figure out to find the exit.

Most of the levels make at least some sense, they look a bit like you might expect and have some interesting features. Overall I thought the level design was pretty fair, although perhaps not outstanding. Bad guys are not typically very tough, but you’ll face a lot of them. In most cases you’ll be hard pressed on the higher difficulty levels to last very many levels in, at least it was pretty darned hard for me. Even on the easiest setting, Forsaken is far from a walk in the park.

As if all the opponents aren’t enough you also need to contend with figuring out how to get from point A to point B. In the earlier levels it isn’t that hard, but in some it is downright brain puzzling. Generally you’ll need to find switches to activate openings or power up machinery to move ahead. Nothing too original about that, but the lack of a map and the maze-like quality of many of the levels makes it hard to keep track of where you’ve been. Overall I thought that the levels were just a bit too hard, but as with anything your mileage may vary.

Internet and LAN Play

While the single player experience is far from bad, the thing that will keep players hooked on Forsaken will be multiplayer. There are multiple modes including free for all, teams, capture the flag, bounty hunt and team bounty hunt. The latter of these is essentially “Kill the Fool with the Chicken” from Outlaws fame, but is well done nonetheless. The objective is to find the gold bar on the level and hold it as long as you can.

I found it easy to find games on Mplayer. There were always numerous in progress when I logged in, even during the day, and you can join and leave games in progress. Even if the host leaves you aren’t stuck, since the game will use a different machine in the game to take over as host. Interesting implementation, but a dedicated server option would be even better. Probe have promised that in a future patch.

The multiplayer levels are relatively small, so even with only a couple players it’s easy to track people down and fire at will. Weapons and power-ups can be set to spawn in fixed locations or at random and you can customize which powerups will be available in a game if you want. On the whole the multiplayer end has all the features you’d want and is a hoot to play, far better in my opinion than the single player levels.

But not all is rosy. Lag and fairly frequent warping, even on a very fast connection, can be a problem in multiplayer. It’s perhaps not worse than an other Internet shooter, but it seems worse die to the speed and firepower of the opponents.

Graphics, Sound, etc.

If I were 3Dfx I’d bundled Forsaken with every card sold using their chips. It might as well be a demo for all the cool stuff you can do with 3D acceleration. You can play the game without a 3D card, it looks OK with software rendering, but it pales in comparison to the acres of eye candy that you get in the hardware accelerated modes.

I cannot stress this quite enough… this is the most gloriously pretty game your likely to play in a long while. Everything is just very good looking. Colored lighting is used to great effect, textures are thoughtfully applied rather than splashed around, lens flare works well, you name it, this baby has
got it. Ooh-la-la!

On the sound front things aren’t as great, but they are far from bad. The multiple voices you can choose for your computer really add variety and are well done. Weapon sound effects are excellent and varied, and the music simply adds to the overall ambience.

The Verdict

If you liked Descent and have a reasonably fast machine with a good 3D card then Forsaken is likely to make you very happy indeed. If you found Descent tedious and hard to control, the spiffy colored lightning and explosions aren’t going to make the difference. For those that never played the original, Forsaken is an awesomely pretty game, with some tough game levels and interesting multiplayer game play. Worth a look at least, but try the demo before you pay the piper.

Forsaken Screenshots

There both robotic defenses as well as static ones. Plus the occasional bounty hunter to keep you on your toes.	I duke it out with one of the hundreds of enemies you’ll have to face.
The visual are not to be missed. This is the pool of life on the final level of the game.	Two vultures fight over my wreckage in a free for all multiplayer game.

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