Betalicious!

Graphics and Sound

I think the game looks great. The particle effects from things like grenade explosions are excellent. The maps look lovely. Things like the Carbine and Beam Rifle shots look cool, with little spirals in the tracks of the shots. I haven’t noticed any graphical glitches during the game – I thought I’d found one in High Ground, but it was a leaf falling off a tree! There’s lots of attention to detail in both the surroundings and the player and weapon models.

The audio is excellent as usual. Distant gunfire sounds really distant. Each weapon has distinctive sounds. I can’t comment on the 5.1 surround sound aspect of things, since I only have a stereo setup at the moment 🙁

Bugs and glitches

OK, it’s a Beta after all, but I have only found a couple of very minor things so far. I had one occaison where a Brute Spiker was right there on the ground in its spawn point in the low base on Snowbound, and I just couldn’t pick it up. Plus I had a weapon disappear from the ground in front of me in a tunnel on Valhalla. And I also see thin lines full of colours to the left and above any of the “black” screens (such as the loading screen). But that’s been it really. Apart from some slow Matchmaking, it seems great. They could probably release this right now and people would be pretty happy with it. I can’t wait for September, but at least I have three more weeks of Betaliciousness to keep me happy 😀

And finally … a tale from the foxhole

I was playing Single Bomb on Valhalla on Team Training, and ended up with no-one on my team, and four opponents. I lost the first round (defending), but managed to sneak into their base next round and successfully plant the bomb. Next round I successfully defended my base with judicious use of trip mines, and ended up one-on-one for the last round when most of the other team quit. I took the direct approach and used the grav chute (mancannon) to get to the middle of of the map and went along the river. I heard the opponent’s warthog coming behind me, and deployed the trip mine in his path. I jumped out of the way, and there was a big explosion as the warthog blew up, landing some distance away in a fireball! From there it was a simple stroll in and game over 🙂