Deathmatch for Those on a Budget: Part 1

The First Person Shooter genre falls into pretty much two sub-genres, realistic and twitch-based. Realistic FPS games are games like Call of Duty or Crysis which are populate large set-pieces with numerous enemies with your only mission being move forward to the goal. Twitch based games however tend to follow the quick paced deathmatch stylings of Unreal tournament or Quake (or the dozens of enemies in small areas a la Serious Sam or Painkiller).

Nexuiz is a free open source Unreal Tournament style game by indie developer AlienTrap. You have your standard game modes (Deathmatch, Capture the flag, team variations of each, etc.) as well as other favorites like Domination and Race. 'Race?' you ask. Race is just what it sounds like, a race on foot... with guns... and lots of dying. It's not the best mode, but it's an interesting diversion.

The majority of the game's appeal is Deathmatch and it shows as the vast quantity of maps online are predominantly Deathmatch. Gameplay in Nexuiz is fast and frantic with lots of runing with the variety of weapons at your disposal all having fairly interesting ways of reeking mayhem on your opponents. I find that in Nexuiz the weapons seems a bit more 'out there' than even Unreal Tournament's collection of things that go boom. A lot of the weapons also seem to have an ability to ricochet, even the mortar shells can bounce around before they blow. My personal favorite is the Electro gun which fires ricocheting globs of energy that bounce around and then explode, adding a hectic element to any match, and for a bit more firepower the guns alternate-fire is a burst of energy in a beam that can make the globs blow up with added force.

The game does suffer a little on the presentation front, it is based on the Darkplaces engine which is in-turn based off of the Quake Engine. The tech behind game is a little dated, but has been updated quite a bit to include such newer features as HDR. Some maps in the game are worse than others since the some maps are from 2005 when the project first launched. Also the audio end of things (dialog specifically) isn't as crisp as a commercial budget title but it's a negligible issue in the end. The gameplay is the most important part and as I said the game does have that going for it.

There is a commercial version of Nexiuz coming to consoles from developer Illfonic. This has caused a great deal of debate and anger within the fan community for Nexiuz since the console versions will be closed source, based off of the CryEngine 3, and not much if anything is going to tie the two games together other than name. Recently a fork (off shoot) of Nexiuz called Xonotic was started by the community to improve the game and keep it open source.

In the end the game is a shining example of open source and free software and it can be run on Windows, MacOS, and Linux with little to no trouble. Worth your time to download and play around with.