GameCyte

GameCyte goes hands-on with Nexon’s first free-to-play first-person shooter. Our impressions.

One week ago today, Nexon announced Combat Arms, an online FPS to be given away free of charge to any and all interested parties. Though the concept of a quality free-to-play team-based shooter was hardly original, we were intrigued by the robust feature set Nexon announced for the title (not to mention the ridiculously low system requirements), and posited that Combat Arms might be the Call of Duty 4 to EA’s free-to-play Battlefield. But going into this short preview, we knew full well that such lofty expectations would have to be checked at the door — after all, the game is free, not to mention unfinished, with many of the most compelling features still under wraps.

We anticipated a rough, unpolished, barebones shooter…

…but after two frag-filled hours of testing out weapons on Nexon developer skulls, we came away pleasantly surprised.

At its core, Combat Arms is no Call of Duty 4 — it has neither the diversity of accessible tactics nor next-gen shooter sensibilities like bullet penetration and health regeneration — but rather an engaging, accessible throwback to Counter-Strike and its ilk. Years of playing similar FPS notwithstanding, it took approximately three minutes from the moment I launched the game to jump into a ready Elimination server (guided by the simple menu above) and score my first headshot with the default M16 rifle provided, and that’s only because I stopped long enough to take screenshots.

With most everyone wielding rifles like the M16 (above), battles were fairly lopsided in the wide open environments of “Warhead,” a map featuring large warehouses and what appeared to be a nuclear warhead assembly line — the game’s rifles tend towards the realistically inaccurate, and squeezing off headshots required precision and stability. After finding myself on the receiving end of an anti-tank rocket or three, I felt it was time to try a different loadout.

A collection of powerful, balanced weaponry is paramount to a good shooter, and here Combat Arms doesn’t disappoint. The guns are meticulously modeled, weighty, and sound superb with deafening reports and silenced bursts that would have instilled fear, had an Elimination mode death meant more than a five-second timeout. In particular, cocking the USP pistol was music to my ears — you can practically feel just how smooth the mechanism is as your avatar works the slide.

Furthermore, there’s a compelling selection of weaponry as well. Your avatar can carry one primary weapon (rifle, SMG, machine gun, sniper rifle or anti-tank missile), one secondary (pistol or shotgun), a melee weapon (we only saw the standard combat knife) and one of a variety of thrown items. While each weapon has its quirks, there’s a definite triangular hierarchy reproduced here with regards to distance — sniper dominates at long range, rifle at medium, machine gun at close, with SMG balanced across the spectrum — which would make for easy tactical decisions in one-on-one firefights…if it weren’t for the game’s purchasable backpack, which allows any player to carry any two additional weapons and swap at will.

However, in all but the game’s largest available map, one-on-one firefights weren’t very common, because the level design (and the presence of teammates on radar) actively encourages team play. The four maps I tried boasted loads of chokepoints through which a single errant soldier couldn’t hope to survive against even a pair of ready foes, but where two or three could readily breach.

Thrown weaponry (and the LAW anti-tank missile) helps to even the odds when there are multiple targets — the smoke grenade was particularly useful for cover, and the gas grenade creates an hotspot from which enemies will want to rapidly flee — but the blast radii of all these weapons was disappointingly small, grenades could not be primed, and trip mines were easily spotted and evaded without a second thought. We hope Nexon improves these in particular before release.

For the closed beta, Nexon is starting players with approximately 9,000 credits, which for us was more than enough to rent over half of the available guns, modify most weapons with silencers and scopes, purchase a backpack, armor and even vanity items like sunglasses — but only for one day. We’ll be conferring with Nexon soon about how this might change, but for the time being weapons cost around 1000 credits per day on average (with substantial discounts for longer periods) and we earned a little over 100 credits per round we played.

While the weaponry itself was impressive, we can’t say the same for the game’s character models. Animations were rough, jerky and few in number; and whether owing to that or the overabundance of body armor, it was very difficult to tell if enemies were actually taking damage until they keeled over. Especially in close-quarter encounters, this often led to frantic hammering of the trigger, and meant that even properly planned ambushes often went awry when the defending player simply realized — where the attacker was firing from, turned and got a lucky headshot even after taking a dozen rounds in the torso.

While there’s nothing particularly compelling graphically about Combat Arms (the environments look fairly drab and boring compared even to the game’s own classy weaponry) there are thoughtful little touches nevertheless. Though they don’t damage the player, certain maps have steam pipes that will release hot vapor when shot, obscuring vision; bullet holes made in metal surfaces will glow briefly; and weapons reflect light differently depending on the direction and intensity of light sources. And I don’t think many will have to worry about performance: running on a four-year old PC with single-core processor and GeForce 6800 at max settings, 1920×1200 resolution, the frame rate never dipped below 60 FPS, and was often in the high 80s.

All-in-all, especially considering the amount we’ll be paying to play, we think Combat Arms’ core gameplay is more than adequate; and should Nexon deliver the planned community features and carrot-and-stick incentives for successful play, this could be quite the timesink for shooter fans on a budget.

But why take our word for it? As late as 2PM today, beta keys were still available at Fileplanet, and you’re only a few clicks away.

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