Battalion 1944 succeeds in stripping away the clutter of the modern FPS
Battalion proclaims itself to be a stripped down, tackle-out, "old-school" multiplayer shooter. I find this an interesting statement, as to me old-school means rocket-jumps, glistening gibs and mind-bending level design - aka games that graduated with a first from the University of John Romero. Battalion, on the other hand, studied at Zampella polytechnic, as evidenced by the khaki browns and Wehrmacht greys, minimalist puffs of gore, and the presence of a prone key. Lesson number one, Battalion, nobody lies down in an old-school shooter unless they're dead. Now, onto nailgun aesthetics and implementation...
The key clarification here is that Battalion is an old-school World War Two shooter. At a basic level, this means "like the original Call of Duty multiplayer but with anti-aliasing." Yet the situation isn't quite that simple. Hidden behind Battalion's bullet-peppered Norman hedgerows are shades of Counter-Strike and Day of Defeat. It's a multiplayer shooter that hopes to cater both to simple arcade pleasures and more dedicated eSportsy types, rewarding skilful and measured play as much as it does bunny-hopping and pneumatic wrist-joints.
This isn't some incisive observation on my part. It's precisely how the beta was presented, offering both an "arcade" component that cycled between three maps and and three modes (the latter being team deathmatch, domination, and capture-the-flag) alongside a fourth, ranked mode called Wartide that offered a slight variant of Counter-Strike's bomb-defusal shenanigans. In both cases, players were split into two teams of five, assuming the role of either an allied or axis soldier, and could select from a range of weapons that includes rifles, sniper-rifles, sub-machine guns, or shotguns.
Post a Comment