As most of you are aware, Barking Dog Studios of Counter-Strike 5 fame has been working on their own tactical shooter, Global Operations, for a while now. The game recently started a 1000 player beta test and I was fortunate enough to get in on it. Following are some screenshots from the game and the interface and some brief first impressions.

I haven't really played the game enough yet to be entirely sure what I think of it, but it seems to be a mixed bag. It has the Counter-Strike - like gameplay going for it (though it's different in that you can be brought back by a medic after dying like in RTCW, and you can rejoin the current round without having to wait for everyone to die first), player models and weapon models are mostly good, but level design and textures, ick.

There are 2 levels included with the beta, and its either nice design with average to poor textures, or bad design with average textures. It's not just the Lithtech engine, the art is just not up to pro standards. As it is, it's barely above Counter-Strike levels. For a 2001 game to not be able to compete with a game running on an engine from 1998 is just..bad. The GUI could use some work but I don't really have much to complain about when it comes to that and there certainly isn't anything that can't be fixed before release next year.

What is fortunate is that the netcode doesn't seem to be that bad at all. Since there aren't many European servers, and the few that are up are mostly empty, I ended up playing on the Crave and other servers in the US. Even with a 180-200 ping it is acceptable and I'm getting my kills in.

What's also good is that even though this beta is just starting, I haven't noticed many bugs at all. The only thing I really noticed is that it takes the game 5 minutes to realize that I timed out from a server, and I think it crashed on exit perhaps once, but aside from that things look good and judging from the posts on the GO beta forum, the issues that have popped up are mostly minor.

So all things considered, it has potential, but the levels and textures are really keeping me from fully enjoying the game. I should have a longer preview in about a week hopefully where I'll touch on the weapons, player classes and all that.