At the time of posting this, there’s roughly 14 hours remaining in Muse Games Kickstarter focused on expanding the core gameplay of Guns of Icarus Online, a steampunk styled multiplayer airship PvP battler with a heavy emphasis on teamwork, into offering additional PvE focused content and a much larger persistent world to compliment it. Muse Games offered the following in thanks of the support that successfully funded the campaign:
We pushed over our threshold funding target in the first month of the campaign, and since then it’s been the long, steady ascent toward our stretch goals, like skywhales. We’re incredibly grateful to everyone who’s backed us so far for your continued faith, enthusiasm, and support. We’ve already plunged ahead into development of co-op mode, and we’re busy hatching our plans for future. In the meantime, we’ve also been doing a bit of catch-up on our infrastructure to support our sudden surge in popularity these last two weeks, so please bear with us as we take turns banging on the servers with mallets!
But even though the upcoming Adventure Mode has already funded, it’s not too late to support Adventure Mode and snag some of the sweet goodies that comes along with it. Who knows, if enough jumped on board they might even get the econo-political system included as an extended goal! Check out what’s up for grabs on their Kickstarter Page.
Insurgency is created by a small community focused team known as New World Interactive. As a follow-up game to the award-winning Source mod, Insurgency is highly competitive and unforgivingly lethal, striking a balance between one-life gameplay and prolonged action.
Note: This is a buy-to-play retail game.
Features
Nine Game Modes: Insurgency has unique modes that are focused on tactical operations or sustained combat, including Firefight, Skirmish, Search & Destroy, Strike and more.
Vast weaponry: Over 20 weapons with numerous attachments, no crosshair, and a focus on realistic weapon behavior including a free-aim system and intense suppression effects.
Various real world locations: 12 multiplayer and cooperative maps that take place in 6 distinctive environments ranging from Iraq to Afghanistan to Somalia.
Squad systems and communication: Includes a squad system built upon role-based player classes, which are customizable and asymmetrical based on what team you are on, as well as a squad-based communication system which includes 3D VOIP, allowing friendly and enemy players within proximity to hear you.
Realistic games are a rare thing, especially coming in the form of a first person shooter. When I heard about Insurgency and the chance to play in the alpha, it didn’t take me long to say yes. The fps genre and shooters in general have always been one of my favorite categories of games and I’ve wasted more hours of my life than I should be proud of sampling the various options. But while the genre has recently been pushing further into the science fiction end of the spectrum or otherwise totally cartoony, Insurgency pushes realism harder than anything in recent memory. In that sense you get the feeling that the developers attacked this project to build a game they personally wanted to play rather than just what was currently proven successful by others in the market.
What started out in 2007 as just a mod to Half Life 2, Insurgency has grown into its own standalone game purely by popular demand. Its total downloads reached over a million and at its height of popularity received the ModDB “player’s Choice Mod of the Year”. And here we are 6 years later and the game is in alpha waiting to release as a standalone game. So in today’s overcrowded market what would make you want to even look at another new shooter? Well if you’re someone who has grown sick of the engrossing stories, rollarcoaster style presentation, or just players one-upping you by bunnyhopping in circles spraying their automatic rifle, Insurgency is your light at the end of the tunnel. This game isn’t just a game where you can wildly sprint through the enemy’s fortification and think you’ve got a 50/50 shot of killing the enemy first. No Insurgency actually takes skill, tactics, and teamwork to overcome the opposing team.
What is Skill?
To clarify I’m not saying you need to be the best sharpshooter in the world to hold your own in Insurgency. Sure, knowing where to aim even though you lack a crosshair is a good thing to have, but without the knowledge and the planning, you are still one of the brainless spray and pray players that the genre’s community has become infected with. Insurgency lets you experience the excitement and realism of what real soldiers might be experiencing. The choice to peak around an unknown corner can get you a quick bullet to the skull before you know what hit you.
Sure, it is still a game and a real soldier might be laughing at me even saying this, but so far this game brings the intensity and suspense like nothing else. One well-placed bullet can completely eliminate your target and disrupt his team’s plans, and that is what makes Insurgency so exciting. Games such as Call of Duty and Battlefield claim to be realistic shooters, but these games aren’t truly. Don’t get me wrong here, both of these games are really awesome shooters but they are missing the real feeling that you know you aren’t just a meat bag holding a gun.
Now let’s go into the most hated thing in first person shooters, which is camping. This term is given to players that sit in one corner the whole match shooting at any player that might cross their field of vision. Sure in some of the games named above you might be called an idiot for doing that, because well they will see you as a fun disturbing player. But ask any military veteran, and they will call you crazy not to be one of these ‘campers’. Sure you will spawn 10 seconds later and you can try to get yourself going again, but you will keep dying over and over if you sprint like a headless chicken. Just as in a real war, every step you take will matter. If you make one stupid mistake, you will most be on your way to face-planting the dirt. Just as I said before, you will have to contemplate and plan every step and transfer from cover to cover to succeed.
Of course a game would be pretty stale if you just had a bunch of players playing the patience game waiting for the other to slip up first. Instead coordinating with your allies to offer suppression fire and tactical sprints through open ground to new camping spots is vital to giving your side greater area of control on each map. Just realize you are not going to be able to spin circles in the middle of the street wiping out an entire enemy squadron with a series of no-scope kills. Like a well-oiled machine, a well-coordinated team will be able to push the enemy back and secure objectives by working in perfect unison to outplay their enemies. As such Insurgency’s scoring system rewards teams for how successful they are in driving back enemies and taking objectives rather than the typical kill-death ratio.
With the use of multiple weapons such as automatic rifles, shotguns, submachine guns, and sniper rifles, you will find your gameplay changes drastically depending on the weapon you bring to a fight. Snipers will need massive map awareness and spend their time picking off front line opponents preparing that aren’t as perfectly covered as they imagined. Those that can keep a cool-head under fire though might opt for the submachine gun/grenade combo to blow enemies out of heavily fortified positions. Enough utility tools exist in this game to give veteran players some pretty wild tactics that will keep you guessing on the receiving end for many hours while you get your bearings in Insurgency. Of course this further adds to the suspense and thrill of each battle as the maps are cleverly designed to offer various ways to offensively tackle or defensively protect each objective. Moving down a dark hallway never felt like such a stressful endeavor in other shooters.
Conclusion
Insurgency is not to be taken lightly. I promise with my countless hours spent in various shooters, I’ve never felt a game bring this level of emotion and realism before. Insurgency turns the genre from rewarding twitch masters and making each player feel like a chess piece on a board where the better team leader wins, so long as one of your allies isn’t the weak link that destroys your goals. With three different available classes that give you either more agility, armor or weapon control, you will really have to think through what kind of weapons and role you intend to play on your team each match. That said the game won’t be for everyone. If you get your kicks being the hero and shooting endless ammo into every dark corner, you’re going to probably find Insurgency too slow-paced overall. But those seeking well aimed shots to instantly end fights and long shoot-out standoffs, Insurgency delivers big time and still has plenty of time to further polish the systems before full launch. Though if you can’t wait like I couldn’t, you can jump in now via the Steam Store and make sure your voice is heard to push the development of the game in the direction you envision.
On May 21st, high-level players will get the chance to chop up a new Ultimate Boss: the legendary Dragon Pig, who reveals himself in a special teaser.
What are Ultimate Bosses?
Ultimate Bosses are WAKFU’s hardcore PvE (player vs environment) content. They are instanced bosses, accessible once per week. They require players to develop a team strategy for several weeks before confronting them and being able to beat them and obtain very rare items.
The Dragon Pig: a crossmedia character welcomed in WAKFU
The Dragon Pig is a huge creature, as fearsome as he is stinky… and surprisingly swift! He appeared for the first time in a DOFUS dungeon, a story that was told in a one-shot DOFUS Monster manga which bears the Dragon Pig’s name. But he also appears twice in the WAKFU series.
The Dragon Pig is a real tactical challenge that is aimed at very-high-level players (120-125). Those players’ behavior will influence the monster’s aggressiveness and the outcome of the battle!
To learn more about his behavior and characteristics and to see examples of the rewards players have the chance to receive for fighting him, read the official devblog.
GunCraft is a new addition to the emerging genre of Minecraft-like shooters that started with Brick-Force and Ace of Spades. It gives you the fast-paced action you’ve come to love from an FPS, and combines it with the creativity involved with playing Minecraft. This creates an interesting gameplay experience where the map can always be different and changed. Don’t like that wall? Destroy it. This new layer of strategy should make for a very exciting game.
Customization
Customization is pretty nice in GunCraft. There’s a pretty extensive class editor where you can come up with your own classes to play in the game, or just modify existing ones. You are given the ability to choose your skin, your weapons, your special abilities and other useful things that you’ll need to go on a killing rampage. There is also the scene editor where you can create maps by stacking blocks, just like Minecraft. The one thing I didn’t find, which I would have liked, was an in-game skin creator, but it’s not too much of an issue as you’re given a wide variety of pre-sets to work with.
Graphics
Think of Minecraft. Well GunCraft’s graphics are a tad bit worse, in my opinion. But they’re still in the same style. Its downfall is the textures, which are very bland, even compared to other block-based games. For all that it accomplishes, however, I don’t find the lack of texture quality a negative. Overall, I am happy with the graphics in GunCraft.
Controls
GunCraft uses the controls that you would expect from a shooter. WASD movement with left click to shoot, right click to zoom. The one thing that threw me off was that, at least not by default, you cannot use the 1-9 keys or the mouse wheel to change weapon. Other than that, it was quite easy to pick-up. If you’ve played a shooter in the past, you will feel right at home playing GunCraft.
Community
It’s a shooter community, so there is a bit of rough language. For the most part, however, the players are helpful and nice. I’ve had no issue finding active games, even at 3:00AM in the morning. However, I’ve got to say that the community is not very large. Definitely not as large as similar games, such as Ace of Spades. But, as I didn’t have an issue finding a game, I won’t give the community aspect of the game a bad score.
Gameplay
GunCraft plays a lot like your average FPS. You spawn, you kill, you die, you spawn, you kill, rinse and repeat. There is just about every kind of weapon you could want. There are special abilities you can activate to give you a slight advantage, too. On top of that, there are the creative aspects where you can build or destroy the map as you please. Basically, it’s Black Ops meets Minecraft.
The FPS aspect is, as I said, very similar to other FPS games. I get the feeling they were trying to emulate the Call of Duty: Black Ops style, though. This means it’s very fast paced and filled with interesting things, such as drones, kill streaks, and no scopes. It’s not a very tactical game, but there is some room for it. You will be rewarded for taking your time and letting people come to you, rather than running around like you have no idea what you’re doing.
I really didn’t see much of the in-game block-placement while I played. It just didn’t seem like a major part of the gameplay. It seemed that everyone either did not know how to make use of it, or just chose not to. Perhaps in some game modes or maps it will play a larger part. But other than that, it worked pretty well when it was used.
The map creator is nice. I really enjoyed spending time creating the maps (despite knowing that no one would ever use my creations). It was almost like creative mode in Minecraft, but the selection of blocks wasn’t as diverse. It would be great if they could one day allow for some of the great stuff you can do in Minecraft with redstone and such. But, there are some neat traps and such you can put in your map, such as gravity lifts.
One of the many unique survival style modes present in-game
Conclusion
GunCraft is on the fast track to being a great game. The thing I love about modern game development is that even after the game is released, more features and content can be added in. I love this new melding of genres that are happening now, and this is a great example of what can be accomplished with a bit of innovation. I’ve got a few things I would like to see added to the game, but I have no real issues with what is already available. If you like shooters and Minecraft, I suggest you give this game a go and support their Steam Greenlight page as well.
In case you missed it here is a little catch up of what happened over the weekend in Neverwinter. A huge exploit was discovered which basically broke the economy of the world. The game was shut down for a good portion of Sunday while they worked out the problem, how to deal with it and what to do about the people who took advantage of it. The game was then patched, the abusers banished, and they rolled Neverwinter back 7 hours to a time before the economy completely crashed. A lot of progress and items were lost in that 7 hour roll back and the folks at Perfect World know it. Which is why they’re putting together a little thank you package for everyone. It should be available by the end of the week.
Obsidian Entertainment Teaming with Allods Creators to make Skyforge
Skyforge was first announced way back in May 2012 by the Allods Online team but then faded from memory as nothing else was heard about it. Well that all changes today. Mail.ru announced at KRI 2013, the Russian Game Developers conference that Obsidian Entertainment would be teaming up with the Allods Team to make Skyforge. You can still check out the 9 minute video introduction to it, and fortunately if you don’t speak Russian you can at least look at the pretty images.
8 Bit Studios Launches Kickstarter for MOBA Skara
A new MOBA is entering the arena as 8 Bit Studios launches a Kickstarter event for Skara – The Blade Remains. It is described as a MOBA that allows live action fighting along the lines of Streetfighter and Call of Duty. 8 Bit is hoping to raise £150,000 in the next 40 days. Be sure to look out for more information about it later this week in the weekly Kickstarter column on OnRPG.