WarPath Demo

WarPath Multiplayer Demo Impressions:

What has happened to Digital Extremes? Weren't these guys instrumental in creating the first UT? First Pariah and now this? Its technically capable as a shooter, but its just got absolutely no soul and is no fun to play. Everything from the menus, to the weapons, to the textures, to the sounds - its all so horrifically generic that it may have well been called "Multiplayer Shooter".

The Unreal engine defaults are in there; massive headache inducing weapon bob, fairly useless console, and high poly world decorations. Couple those with frantic gameplay that gives absolutely no feedback to what you're doing in the world (did I just kill him? How much damage is this shotgun doing? What kind of weapon am I actually holding? What are these glowing things, health? That explosion didn't hurt me at all...) and you have a very unsatisfying experience.

There seems to only be three available weapons in the demo (which you choose 2 of during your weapons load-out screen). There looks to be more weapons, but they're locked. You get a grenade launcher, a shotgun, and a machine gun. Every weapon is zoom capable. I never once ran out of ammo. You've also got a health recharging thingy, makes it real easy to never die. There's a press-once and use sprint button that puts your weapon away and zooms you along at what seems to be 2x speed. The massive sprint + health regen util makes flag running in CTF a joke. Reload time on the shotgun is atrocious too. For such a fast paced game reloads should be minimal, if not nonexistant.

Granted, I wasn't able to play online, only versus bots. I can't seem to find any servers up in the browser, and attempting to start a server resulting in nobody joining. Methinks it *might* be better online with humans, but probably not. Oh, forgot to mention - the mouse sensitivity is a joke. Its default is 3.00 for both X and Y axis. I'm a super low sens guy so I cranked 'em down to 1.00, figured it would probably be good enough. HOLY CRAP NO. I was able to do *two* 360s in a single swipe on my small mousepad. I put them both to 0.25 (the lowest possible) and it was still too herky jerky. Ugh.

Performance is far far FAR below par. Its obviously the UT2K4 engine and it runs like poo. I've got a 2.4GHz A64, 1.5GB RAM, and a massively overclocked 7800GT. 1024x768 was playable at ~45-60fps, but trying to play in 1600x1200 resulted in <30fps. Uhh... I get better framerates in Doom3/Quake4, FEAR, COD2, BF2, CS:S, DoD:S, etc. and they all look worlds better. Attempting to FRAPs my gameplay @ halfscreen resolution put me squarely in the 20-30 fps range. Not good.

I hate to be so negative on an obvious budget game (from DE of all people, I used to idolize these guys), but it just stinks of generic sci-fi shooter. This kind of stuff MAY have been a bit of fun back before the days of UT and Q3... but such unpolished controls, graphics, and gameplay are just not going to fly these days.

Videos I took while playing against bots. My first games, but the "gameplay" didn't advance much from what you see here. Bots were on the second to hardest difficulty.

http://dko5.shackspace.com/vids/WarPath_FFA.wmv
http://dko5.shackspace.com/vids/WarPath_CTF.wmv

CTF video still uploading