There’s no shortage of first-person shooters on the PC, and the genre looks like it’s in no danger of losing steam anytime soon. One of the upcoming FPSes is Hellforces, due out sometime in the vague period of "Q1 2005". Developed by Orion, and published by Buka Entertainment, Hellforces promises all sorts of revolutionary features, but after spending some hands-on time with the game, it doesn’t appear to be doing anything now that anyone else wasn’t doing three years ago.

Hellforces opens with your character being interrogated about his former girlfriend, a drug addict who ended up choosing drugs over you when you finally laid down the law. It seems that she was somehow involved with the wealthy biophysicist Henry Alfred Cole who has found a way to extract the soul from the body and use it for a power source. The now soulless bodies roam the city, which begs the question of who is using all this newfound power. Of course, it’s all up to you to find out what happened to your ex-girlfriend and put an end to all the zombies that don’t need energy that are flooding the streets. This is all revealed to you through some painfully bad voiceacting that is almost so bad that it’s amusing - but not quite.

Make no mistake about it; Hellforces is a shooter through and through. Just moments after starting out, you’ve already got two weapons, a metal pipe and a pistol, and you will need them as fast as you can equip them, because as you step out of the alleyway you’ll encounter the first of many zombies that want you dead. Nobody expects zombies to have tons of intelligence, but the AI is underwhelming, even for the undead. Zombies will attack in waves, not "activating" until you get to a certain point, and then don’t do anything more than walk up to you and do the same attack over and over. There’s something to be said for wasting wave after wave of bad guys, but with so many other games offering a bit more complexity, Hellforces feels a little dated.

The controls are standard PC shooter fare; "WSAD" moves you around, the space bar makes you jump, the scroll button on the mouse cycles weapons, and of course, you look and aim with the mouse. These controls work fairly well, though it will take a little bit of time to learn the many shortcuts for things like saving and weapon selection.

Buka promises "Perfect graphical realization with advanced DirectX 9 effects", but at this stage, the visuals aren’t particularly impressive. There’s nothing wrong with them per se; it’s just that they look a bit dated, and the "zombies overrunning a dreary city" thing has been done so much that there’s not a whole lot you can do from an originality standpoint. The zombies don’t react to bullet fire until they’re dead, and when they finally do show damage, it’s always in the same place, regardless of where you are shooting them. There is plenty of blood, and the zombies do look rather gruesome, so if you like gore, then you’ve certainly got something to look forward to.

In all honesty, there’s absolutely nothing so far to make this game a compelling purchase. At this point the graphics are dated and the gameplay is woefully stale. The story may be interesting, but the voiceacting is so horrific that it makes the game tough to take seriously. There’s also no online feature, so the only way you’ll be playing against friends is via LAN. It hasn’t been released yet, so that means there’s still improvements that can be made, but as of right now things aren’t looking too good for Hellforces. ]]> Fri, 11 Mar 2005 17:14:24 -0600