E.T. Armies is a game that is coming out March 3rd on steam and we were lucky enough to get a pre release client to bring you one of the first reviews!
Before we dive into the review lets get a little backstory from the developer:
Features
- Experience challenging fast-paced combat against a variety of enemies
- Three detailed and unique environments from rich historical ruins to an abandoned factory
- Features a full single player campaign along with peer to peer, LAN and Steam multiplayer
- Complete Brutal mode to prove your FPS skills
- High quality, polished and unique indie visuals
- Epic scores to immerse you in the battle experience
On February 3rd 2016 trade sanctions on Iran were lifted and as a direct result Merge Games is proud to announce the imminent release of E.T. Armies for PC. Developed by Tehran-based Raspina Studio, E.T. Armies is a sci-fi-based first person shoot’em-up powered by Unreal Technology. E.T. Armies is the first game from the Iranian developer and was winner of IndieDB’s Best Upcoming Indie Game of 2013 Players Choice award.
Extra-Terrestrial Armies is a fast-paced, science-fiction, first-person-shooter. A new force has risen on Earth. You will play as a Parsis soldier, on a mission to resist this new power from Planet Earth, a power that hungers for supremacy and war. Defend against the massive invasion of the Forsaken. Fight against different enemies with your allies and defend your land from their brutality.
After getting over the initial disappointment that this in fact wasn't a game about E.T. the movie, I settled in for the review and came away satisfied.
E.T. Armies has both a single player campaign and a multiplayer death match aspect to it. The main story of E.T. Armies is a narrative case about the future human wars to provide the energy resources that are needed to operate. In the beginning of the game you are separated from your "boss" and must fight your way back to him against enemy robots. The story overall is well put together but gets rather thin and predictable once you get past the desert missions. You never really feel much connection to the characters that are involved and the game doesn't really emotionally involve you on your journey. With that being said, E.T. Armies is a solid first person shooter that looks very impressive considering its an indie game.
The general game play is fluid and the everything functions as it should, some other reviewers had hit box issues when using certain weapons, but fortunately I didn't see any of those problems recreated during my play through.As previously stated E.T. Armies was developed using Unreal engine and the results are very noticeable. The desert scenes definitely look the best, while the rest of the game also looks good the flying fragments and environment of the first missions are what stands out.
I was able to push the game settings to Ultra on 1440p, while using a Nvidia 980Ti, and got a solid 45 fps. (Update: As of 2/25/2016 a 250MB update was released which raised my FPS to a silky smooth 65 FPS while being able to keep all settings at Ultra)
Unfortunately there were also some cons to the review. While the A.I. "worked" for the most part, it was never really challenging or adaptive. The only point in the game where the A.I. seemed challenging was when the developers chose to use infinite spawn points to try to crank up the action, i felt this to be more of a cheap trick to try to make up for the below par A.i. in the game. While the graphics during the first few desert levels look very nice, once you leave this area the graphics because generic and E.T. Armies begins to lose most of its luster.
While E.T. Armies does have a multiplayer aspect to the game, nobody was online during my review so I couldn't really review that portion of the game. I will update my review once there are players online to interact with
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While I believe this is a great first project by Raspina projects, E.T. Armies feels like a generic FPS game. You can easily find better looking FPS with better controls and storylines that came out a few years ago. I enjoyed the game, but not enough to spend my money on it.
