Well, goodness. This is certainly different. It’s like Halo and Alien Shooter have gone and made a sci-fi lovechild. In fact, this game is so different from what people might consider a casual game that we seriously questioned even reviewing it on our site. Where are the jewels? Where are the cakes? Where are the cute and sassy female lead characters? Instead, we have a desolate wasteland populated by buzz saw robots, evil space marines, and exploding barrels of radioactive goo. An almost disconcerting amount of goo, in fact. We seriously wondered, are there not a million hardcore review sites that should be covering this game?

But once you get past the fact that the game is essentially Quake stripped down and built for your mothers old computer, you can see that a lot of the basic casual game hallmarks are there. Buyable powerups, simple easy missions, a nice easy learning curve, and popcorn-munching 10 minute gameplay. But now instead of matching brightly colored trinkets, you get to kill things and blow stuff up. In 3D. There is even a sort of Starfox-looking space-fighter-rail-shooter game before each level where your dropship must avoid mines, go through hoops, and catch powerups as you drop to the surface of the planet. The music is thunderingly good if you are into hardcore electronic dance music, and the special effects, sounds, and overall production value of the game is first rate. Even the menus and user interface is slick and compelling. For a casual game, that is.

And that’s part of the problem. Compared to AAA shooters like Far Cry and Half Life, the game is almost a decade out of date on every aspect. The fog plane is set so close you can barely see your nose, the AI is almost non-existent, and the graphics are all very, very dated. The destructible terrain is nice, and the enemy design is not bad at all – the spinning buzz-saw enemies are particularly inspired, but these aren’t enough to make the game really compete in the very competitive FPS market. But is it fair to compare this game to games that cost millions to make? Not really. Compared against other games on the same server, it’s a technical masterpiece. Compared against the bargain bin shooters at Best buy, it’s barely competitive. And that’s the key issue here.

In fact, playing this game, we generally wondered, “Is this the beginning of the end of casual games?” One by one, we’re seeing the classic AAA game genres stripped, and sold online as casual games. How long is it before we get a casual Civilization? A casual Starcraft? A casual Heroes of Might and Magic? Will we flood this new market with the same old games we played a dozen years ago? And is this a good or bad thing? On one hand, those were good games. And maybe repackaging them for a broader audience will be a way to grow the entire gaming community. This may be cool, and there’s likely going to be some good games made in this model. But will this chase out the embryonic innovation that we see in the casual industry now? Will great and innovative games like Hexalot and Chuzzle be able to compete against games with 10x the funding or more? Will casual developers be able to build garage studio games and compete effectively with them as they do now? And when the casual audience becomes more used to the heightened production values of AAA games, will we simply be bringing all of the “5 million dollar me-too-clone” issues of the AAA PC development world into casual games? Will we start making only games with orcs, space marines, or licensed sports teams, just like the AAA industry? Will the production budgets and marketing budgets skyrocket and destroy the freedom independent developers have in this segment of the industry?

We have no idea. If we did, we’d be making a lot more money than we are now. But the thought both scares and excites us. But what is obvious is that with games like Aveyond, Fable, and now Devastation Zone Troopers, we are seeing the dividing line between casual and hardcore games get blurrier and blurrier, and seeing this new segment of the total game industry evolve. And that’s good. Hopefully.

(1 votes, average: 2 out of 5)

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