In our perfect world, everyone wears a jetpack. Like rainbow sprinkles, they tend to improve anything they’re attached to, and that includes shooters - just ask the 30-foot war obelisk we’ve commissioned to commemorate Starsiege: Tribes.
Where’s the MMO meat? The massive aspects (sci-fi styled lobbies, PvE missions, training areas) are more in place to frame your matches and create persistency within a player-driven space. Character customization (most of it stylized, some of it quirky, like holiday-themed reindeer antlers) and other MMO vitals are here, too, but for a flagship feature, Hi-Rez is introducing a month-long PvP alliance campaign that agencies (GA’s player-formed guilds) compete in simultaneously. On a macro level, it looks like a board game - each agency is allotted its own map of hexes that they develop by terraforming territory and building structures that earn resources or add defensive buffs once you’re in combat. Week-to-week, other agencies target individual hexes to attack, which each represent a map instance for scheduling a match. Lose the match, you’ll need to rebuild that area - you’ll do better if you’re able to build a safe border of structures to surround your HQ.
On-screen, Hi-Rez’s tweaks to the Unreal 3 engine look good - neon-hued weapon effects and shiny suits slot well with bright environments. Otherwise, we loved one game mechanic in particular: the power pool that anchors your actions. Rocket launchers and other weapons don’t use ammo, they pull from a shared battery used by your jetpack and other items, meaning you always have a sense of your combat capability as it drains and restores.
Although a shooter-MMO has yet to find lasting success on any platform, Global Agenda - which repackages the fond, familiar cooperative and mobile combat of TF2 and Tribes with layers of MMO goodness - seems as sound a candidate as we might get this year. Look for the beta to drop during second quarter preceding a year-end release.
+ A promising genre hybrid with a fundamental focus on action over slow-paced MMO conventions. Refreshing character design; abilities like super-leaping, flight, and invisibility made us feel like a sci-fi supersoldier.
– Being light on lore and mission content, a good part of GA’s experience will rely on player conflict to keep it interesting.
Mar 9, 2009
