So I play the game.
And it is very obviously still in beta- most likely mid to early beta. At least, I can only hope!
The graphics thus far are still a bit rough, though reminiscent of Unreal Tournament. And the sound effects are too, since many of them are stolen straight out of UT and other games, such as some of the weapon holstering/changing effects, and others.
The vehicles are fun and are probably inspired by the recent XBox hit
Halo. Only two were available in the demo: the Humvee and Dune Buggy. The Buggy seats one driver and a gunner, and the Humvee seats a driver and two gunners, and possibly a passenger too (though I didn't experiment all that much with that). The unfortunate part is that in the demo, the gunner positions of these two vehicles have no guns: you simply use whatever handheld weapon you currently carry; though I suspect the other promised vehicles for the full game will sport some nasty hardware! (Can anyone say A-1 Abrahms? I knew you could!
But we shall see...)
Another strange, or.. err.. maybe kewl thing.. is that the tires can be blown out on these vehicles. The weird part? The tires reinflate after about 15 seconds... all on their own! Hmm..
The weapons: semi-auto pistol; fully automatic machingun with secondary 'scoped/aimed' fire-mode; shotgun; hand placed mini-gun with tripod; sniper rifle; rocket launcher; some kind of mine/placed-charge device; grenades.
The weapons are nothing new really to the genre, and work as would be expected. They have simulated inaccuracy (ala RtCW, MoHAA, etc.) and look only sub-par on screen right in your main view. When you spawn, you are instantly in the weapons loadout screen, and have a limited amount of space in which to carry items and weapons. For instance, there is enough space for you to carry your pistol, the machine gun, sniper rifle, and grenades. Or, you could configure you equipment to include your pistol, the mini-gun, and body-armor. Once you make your choice(s) by scrolling through the list of available gear and clicking on it, you must use a hotkey to exit the loadout screen and start the action. A bit cumbersome in my opinion, especially if you are using the same loadout everytime. Hopefully the devs will streamline this somehow.
The only playable level included is a Western-ish 'domination' map, complete with abandoned mines and a Waterloo base in which the objective 'switch' is perched. The whole level is quite bland, including the mono-toned canyon wall, ground, and building textures. The layout was not much better than a newbie mapper's first attempt at a symetrical "you start at this end, I start at that end, and we meet in the middle and fight" map. But hey- just a demo!
Actually, the whole game has a lot of promise, but the demo is quite shy about fulfilling these promises. But it is only a demo, so we won't know until later what we REALLY are getting in Mobile Forces.
[But why would they release a demo of a game in such an early stage of development? Be warned!!
)
