Its a solid, round-based multiplayer experience, spent about 20 minutes all in all getting it ready and working and a few hours playing it.
It is very pretty, and to those with slightly weaker systems (see: My System
) you should adjust the graphics settings before running online, and regardless of you computer's power, I would highly suggest loading up a random map to make sure it runs well on your system before braving the wilderness of multiplayer.
And for those who haven't been following (what a surprise, just like ME!), here's a quick run down of gameplay. As I said it is round based, the server I played on had rounds of about 5-6 minutes, generally more than enough. The current game-mode (unknown if others are planned), is called "Capture the Ghost", basically there is the Ghost (a
lady robot's torso) somewhere on the map, and the teams just need to retrieve it and take it to their respective "Retrieval Zone", note your Zone is in your team's color and
NOT the RED ones!. The cool thing is that the two sides switch spawn points each time, kind of like CoD4's Search and Destroy, but not really as your goal is always to capture the Ghost.
There are quite a few nice additions over the standard Source equipment. As hinted above, there is not a radar, everything is displayed directly on the HUD relative to its location. There are three points that get overlaid, the first being the Ghost, it is represented as a series of white concentric circles, note if your team has it, it will be colored with your team's colors (Jinrai = green, NSF = blue) and if the enemy has it, it will be red. The next are the Retrieval spots where you drop off the Ghost, downwards pointing arrows in your teams color, the enemy's, of course, is red, note there are two of these on each level, sometime they are near/relative (i.e. the same side) to each other, other times they are quite separate. And finaly your buddies have a little square cross with the center square removed, colored in your teams color. But those aren't the only visual effects added, the others, though, are a lot more gameplay related though.
Most of the player class have the ability to cloak, creating the familiar cloudy figure when activated likening itself to Battlefield 2142, although, since this is not a little hand held device, the player just presses "V" and is able to wield their weapons normally. Also each individual class has a specialty vison that is activated by the "X" button. And, as hinted at above, the game is built around three classes, each with unique abilities and the occasional special weapon.
The Recon class has low armor, highly cloaking charge, and can run without expending energy. The Recon's special weapon are Det Packs, operated in the expected manner. The Recon also has nightvision goggles to illuminate darken passageways.
The Assault has medium armor, low cloaking charge, and has a depletable amount of sprinting energy. But the Assault does pack a single frag grenade as their special weapon. The Assault excels at tacking out cloak enemies with its movement based vision. With the vision turned on anthing that moves glows bright as even thing else is dimmed. Due note though that the friendly crosses have a hard time of showing up in this mode (could be the case for all vsions, but I only really played as Assault).
The final class is the Support with heavy armor, no cloaking, and no ability to run. And to seemingly top it off, their special weapon is a few smoke grenades that severely impair everyone's view (this aren't even cousins with those wimpy BF 2142 smoke grenades!), how is that an appropriate replacement to the other classes explosives? Well it is the Support vision that really turns the tide on it as it is the only one able to peer through this dense smoke.
And of course, there are weapons, quite a wide variety, and while there are some that cross over among the classes, the main difference are some of the higher level weapons and how early they are made available through the promotion system. Oh, and I forgot to mention, at the start of each round, everyone is a private and after some many experience points the you are promoted gaining access to the next teir of weapons. And yes you gain XP by, killing an opponent, capping with the Ghost, assisting a cap, and when your team wins a round.
So in short it is a quite fun, round-based, class, rewards-for-doing-well, and pretty little multiplayer mod. I'm eager to see how this develops around the community (
TG and Neotokyo at large) once everyone has gotten some serious play time in.
And lastly, I apologize for the grammatical errors (Firefox has fixed the spelling atleast
). But I hope y'all let it slide, given the god forsaken hour at witch I am righting this. I'll try to proofread it tomorrow. Oh, and...
DOWNLOAD NEOTOKYO, IT'S QUITE FUN!
Oh, and it is almost a gig, so be prepared for a long download!
