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Tactical Call of Heroes Force: Economy Edition [Free/open source FPS thread]
RSP
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
I'm a freeloader when it comes to electronics. I'm also a rabid fan of FPS games - the combination of action and tactics appeals to me. There are some things I will spend loads of money on, and games are not those things. I could just pirate stuff, but I prefer to play "legit" free FPS games. Some of these legit games are too legit to quit. Others are roughly legit enough to curl up into a ball and die.
The first place anyone in search of free games would probably go is Google. And the first place Google will direct that person to is this list. Then, a sensible person will go through the list and try the games that seem appealing.
Here's what I've tried.
.kkrieger
Pretty much a tech demo. A cool tech demo, but this isn't where you should stop to find actual fun, unless your idea of fun is playing a somewhat buggy single player level with no storyline for about 7 minutes, repeat as necessary. But it is cool and it's not like it's going to take much time to download.
America's Army
Funded by the U.S. Army itself in an attempt to boost recruiting, this one's a favorite of mine. The only issue I took with this game was that it's round based, so there's a lot of downtime compared to most games. If you're a Counter Strike fan it'll be familiar though. Currently, not so great in the graphics department, but not bad either and getting close to switching over to the UT3 engine, which is exciting. Seems it's going to be a major overhaul. In the current version, you'll find the fun thing about this is that it's slow paced, and when people get shot, they die. Generally speaking that means two shots to the chest is a kill - you need to be really fast if you want to win this through your mouse and keyboard alone, otherwise you'd best focus on predicting what people will do to be at the right place at the right time.
All rounds in AA are objective based, but sometimes the objective is something like "get to the other side", which means "kill those guys over there" in almost all cases. Some situations, such as the civilian evacuation offered by the map SF Hospital, are genuinely focused on the objective more than the kills, and can be intense. This is the only game that I ever find to actually be stressful - if you're the last on your team, it can be fairly suspenseful. It is online only, so if you're looking for single player or even LAN fun look elsewhere.
AssaultCube
This game is in some ways lame, and in other ways cool. Mostly, I regret to say it's dissapointing. Built on the open-source Cube engine, AC has a very intuitive, easy to learn, real time map editor. I made a medium sized, city-themed map in one weekend, so it's quite quick to use. Not only that, but you can upload your maps to a game server during play, meaning that you can go from finishing your new map to playing it online within a few minutes if people are willing to vote in your favor. On the other hand, there are only four primary weapons, the models are low poly, and the engine is only capable of Doom-esque environments - that is, maps that could be drawn on a sheet of paper without any overlapping parts. Put more simply, you can't make a room above another room. Additionally, cheat protection is basically limited to the honor system. But, it's a small download at around 40mb and you can run it on almost any computer, including Mac and Linux machines. Online/LAN multiplayer or bot deathmatches, super fast internet not a requirement.
It should be pointed out that AC is almost a social experiment of sorts, at least to me. It asks the question: what would people do if mapping for FPS games was easy and fun? The answer is that they would play a lot of crappy five minute maps made by people who can be amused for hours just be the presence of some colorful lights. Enjoy playing on map "Ezjemville.cgz", which I like to think of as a look into the tormented mind of its creator!
Sauerbraten
This is a simple, old-school game with few features built on an awesome engine. If you checked out the editor in AssaultCube or the original Cube, you probably thought, "If only I could pull cubes out to the side as well, to make upper floors and more complex structures. The Cube 2 engine that Sauerbraten is built on allows you to do exactly that. You can also push in the corners of cubes to make complex shapes, and change the gridsize that you're working with for smaller details or huge mountains. Plus, the engine supports glow, specularity, normal, and parallax mapping, so you can make great looking textures (hint, you can configure the scale that they load at for your map, so you can go as hi or low-res as you want). Because mapping is much more capable than in Cube 1, but also takes a bit longer, the maps you'll find for this game are actually pretty good most of the time and really excellent now and then. Finally, the network code is efficient, so you can play with a few hundred ping if need be. If this is nonsense to you check it out and try to figure out what I'm saying.
"Well," you say, "that's a bunch of nonsense that sounds good, but what about the game?" A valid question. The game has no storyline and no real singleplayer. Multiplayer is a delight for the hardcore old-school gamer - if your idea of the perfect FPS looks like Quake or Unreal Tournament, this is probably a great choice for you. If, like me, you are more into the modern, tactical style shooters, then you'll be disappointed by the lack of reloading, the futuristic weapons (to be replaced in a new version coming in a few weeks) and the overall high speed gameplay based on strategic domination of item pickups. A lot of servers run instant death mode (you have 1 health to start) so if you want to test your mettle with pure mouse-and-WASD based gameplay this is always a challenge. Like AC, there's no real cheat protection but it's a small community where that isn't too important.
Blood Frontier
The first thing you probably think of when you read this name is how terrible the name is. Blood Frontier? Really? What does that even mean? Are they on the forefront of blood technology, or are we talking about actual terrain made of blood here?
Once you get past that, this game is basically Sauerbraten modded to be more of a real game with more eye candy, a fancy HUD, and some new features like weapons that need reloading from time to time. It also has some fairly unique features - you can "impulse" in any direction once in the air, so if you want to jump, then impulse a bit higher, you can do that, but if you want to jump, then impulse a quick strafing move to avoid fire, you can do that too. Impulse into a ramp and quickly jump again, and you can get an extra bit of speed that is just enough to reach some high spots. Additionally, some weapons you pick up start with one shot, but can be loaded up with more, one at a time, when you have the chance. This is less about ammo grabbing than Sauerbraten because once you have a gun, you can reload it all you want - this is not my favorite feature but I can tolerate it. All weapons fire projectiles - no instant bullet hit physics here - and some can cause richochets or splash damage.
Probably the coolest thing about Blood Frontier is that whoever is "master" of a server can set a massive number of variable to determine the starting weapons, the number of weapons that can be carried, the maximum and starting health values, and a plethora of other things. If no master is around, anyone can claim the title (if the server is set up to allow this). Probably the worst thing about Blood Frontier is that it's still in its early stages (v.80) and some things are not quite there yet, including some of the weapon animations, but more importantly the player base is just not present. Usually there are only one or two people online. Those people are sometimes developers of the game though which can be interesting.
BZ Flag
I will never understand this game's appeal.
Combat Arms
Oh, Combat Arms. Why must you taunt us so?
Combat Arms is one of a bunch of emerging, free Korean FPS games. This one is proffered by Nexon, who also brought you Maple Story if you really care. Combat Arms has some good ideas:
-Free
-Large selection of weapons
-Gear and mods to customize weapons
-Big community
It then takes those ideas and combines them with these ideas that you may find good but I consider to be bad or terrible:
-You pay for items with "GP" earned by playing the game (people who play more, have better toys)
-You don't keep what you buy; it expires after a certain time period, a day or week unless you shell out a boatload of "GP" for more time
-Server browser like an MMO instead of an FPS. Doesn't tell you pings or much else.
-If you don't want to pay with "GP", you can also buy some items with "NX". "NX" is a special acronym for a Korean phrase meaning "Real Money".
-Buggy gameplay and rampant cheating
Compared to other games, Combat Arms is pretty commercialized, stupidly so at times, and fairly broken. Seems like it could have worked out better if it was built on a stable engine. I guess the issue is that when you throw in an incentive to winning a lot then there's more motive for some people to cheat. Anyway, I'm not too fond of Combat Arms but some people love it.
Hidden & Dangerous
I guess it's tactical, or something. Think of this as a primitive SOCOM for PC. My main issue with this is that it's ancient, I'm not interested in single-player much, and the campaign works like this:
-Go forward until you get killed.
-Figure out who killed you and where they were standing.
-Kill them next time instead.
-Repeat.
Nexuiz
I haven't tried this one, but it seems worthy of mention at the least.
Tremulous
Another sci-fi shooter. This one has some unique features, and includes building resources as well as fighting. I didn't play it very much, mainly because I didn't like the gameplay a lot. Generally, people will join the human team whenever possible, so you'll find yourself playing as alien quite a bit. Some things, like being able to crawl on walls as some species, are cool though.
This runs on the Quake 3 engine so it's good on Windows and Linux, and has dated but "ok" graphics.
Urban Terror
I like this game a lot do you want to play this game I like to play this game I think you should play it too.
Shooter with modern weapons and gear. Quake 3 engine means fairly simple graphics, but it's all about the gameplay with this one. You can choose a primary, secondary, and sidearm, as well as two items, or ditch the secondary for an extra item. This is nice for trying out different weapons with different playing styles. I usually plan LAN games of 4-6 people in CTF mode, online games with 20+ in TDM, for the most fun.
Urban Terror is not really exceptional and it doesn't do anything I would say is particularly special, but it does what it does very well. In other words; average concept, great execution. The developers have managed to balance the weapons pretty well, and the movement techniques are great with walljumping and more allowing some high speed maneuvering.
Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory
Runs on a tweaked Quake 3 engine, class-based WWII fun.
This game has perhaps the largest player base of any free FPS, and its maps and classes are entertaining and fairly balanced. I never really got into this one too heavily, but it has a lot of pretty neat features that can be fun if you like to play on fairly large maps with a lot of people, in objective-based battles. It also has probably the coolest flamethrower of any game of its time.
True Combat: Elite
Mod of Wolfenstein: ET that goes for modern realism and also tweaks the graphics.
I loved this game. Probably my favorite tactical realism shooter all around, and does so many things right. The problem is, it never had the player base to really make it fun, and that just gets worse and worse all the time. By now, it's near enough dead. The current version is the best-looking game on the engine and the weapons are really cool, but really, nobody plays this game. I mean, there might be one person, but probably not.
War Rock
So this game is Combat Arms, but with vehicles. Includes the things bad about Combat Arms.
Discuss these games. Or other games. Or other things that are not pictures of women.
The first place anyone in search of free games would probably go is Google. And the first place Google will direct that person to is this list. Then, a sensible person will go through the list and try the games that seem appealing.
Here's what I've tried.
.kkrieger
Pretty much a tech demo. A cool tech demo, but this isn't where you should stop to find actual fun, unless your idea of fun is playing a somewhat buggy single player level with no storyline for about 7 minutes, repeat as necessary. But it is cool and it's not like it's going to take much time to download.
America's Army
Funded by the U.S. Army itself in an attempt to boost recruiting, this one's a favorite of mine. The only issue I took with this game was that it's round based, so there's a lot of downtime compared to most games. If you're a Counter Strike fan it'll be familiar though. Currently, not so great in the graphics department, but not bad either and getting close to switching over to the UT3 engine, which is exciting. Seems it's going to be a major overhaul. In the current version, you'll find the fun thing about this is that it's slow paced, and when people get shot, they die. Generally speaking that means two shots to the chest is a kill - you need to be really fast if you want to win this through your mouse and keyboard alone, otherwise you'd best focus on predicting what people will do to be at the right place at the right time.
All rounds in AA are objective based, but sometimes the objective is something like "get to the other side", which means "kill those guys over there" in almost all cases. Some situations, such as the civilian evacuation offered by the map SF Hospital, are genuinely focused on the objective more than the kills, and can be intense. This is the only game that I ever find to actually be stressful - if you're the last on your team, it can be fairly suspenseful. It is online only, so if you're looking for single player or even LAN fun look elsewhere.
AssaultCube
This game is in some ways lame, and in other ways cool. Mostly, I regret to say it's dissapointing. Built on the open-source Cube engine, AC has a very intuitive, easy to learn, real time map editor. I made a medium sized, city-themed map in one weekend, so it's quite quick to use. Not only that, but you can upload your maps to a game server during play, meaning that you can go from finishing your new map to playing it online within a few minutes if people are willing to vote in your favor. On the other hand, there are only four primary weapons, the models are low poly, and the engine is only capable of Doom-esque environments - that is, maps that could be drawn on a sheet of paper without any overlapping parts. Put more simply, you can't make a room above another room. Additionally, cheat protection is basically limited to the honor system. But, it's a small download at around 40mb and you can run it on almost any computer, including Mac and Linux machines. Online/LAN multiplayer or bot deathmatches, super fast internet not a requirement.
It should be pointed out that AC is almost a social experiment of sorts, at least to me. It asks the question: what would people do if mapping for FPS games was easy and fun? The answer is that they would play a lot of crappy five minute maps made by people who can be amused for hours just be the presence of some colorful lights. Enjoy playing on map "Ezjemville.cgz", which I like to think of as a look into the tormented mind of its creator!
Sauerbraten
This is a simple, old-school game with few features built on an awesome engine. If you checked out the editor in AssaultCube or the original Cube, you probably thought, "If only I could pull cubes out to the side as well, to make upper floors and more complex structures. The Cube 2 engine that Sauerbraten is built on allows you to do exactly that. You can also push in the corners of cubes to make complex shapes, and change the gridsize that you're working with for smaller details or huge mountains. Plus, the engine supports glow, specularity, normal, and parallax mapping, so you can make great looking textures (hint, you can configure the scale that they load at for your map, so you can go as hi or low-res as you want). Because mapping is much more capable than in Cube 1, but also takes a bit longer, the maps you'll find for this game are actually pretty good most of the time and really excellent now and then. Finally, the network code is efficient, so you can play with a few hundred ping if need be. If this is nonsense to you check it out and try to figure out what I'm saying.
"Well," you say, "that's a bunch of nonsense that sounds good, but what about the game?" A valid question. The game has no storyline and no real singleplayer. Multiplayer is a delight for the hardcore old-school gamer - if your idea of the perfect FPS looks like Quake or Unreal Tournament, this is probably a great choice for you. If, like me, you are more into the modern, tactical style shooters, then you'll be disappointed by the lack of reloading, the futuristic weapons (to be replaced in a new version coming in a few weeks) and the overall high speed gameplay based on strategic domination of item pickups. A lot of servers run instant death mode (you have 1 health to start) so if you want to test your mettle with pure mouse-and-WASD based gameplay this is always a challenge. Like AC, there's no real cheat protection but it's a small community where that isn't too important.
Blood Frontier
The first thing you probably think of when you read this name is how terrible the name is. Blood Frontier? Really? What does that even mean? Are they on the forefront of blood technology, or are we talking about actual terrain made of blood here?
Once you get past that, this game is basically Sauerbraten modded to be more of a real game with more eye candy, a fancy HUD, and some new features like weapons that need reloading from time to time. It also has some fairly unique features - you can "impulse" in any direction once in the air, so if you want to jump, then impulse a bit higher, you can do that, but if you want to jump, then impulse a quick strafing move to avoid fire, you can do that too. Impulse into a ramp and quickly jump again, and you can get an extra bit of speed that is just enough to reach some high spots. Additionally, some weapons you pick up start with one shot, but can be loaded up with more, one at a time, when you have the chance. This is less about ammo grabbing than Sauerbraten because once you have a gun, you can reload it all you want - this is not my favorite feature but I can tolerate it. All weapons fire projectiles - no instant bullet hit physics here - and some can cause richochets or splash damage.
Probably the coolest thing about Blood Frontier is that whoever is "master" of a server can set a massive number of variable to determine the starting weapons, the number of weapons that can be carried, the maximum and starting health values, and a plethora of other things. If no master is around, anyone can claim the title (if the server is set up to allow this). Probably the worst thing about Blood Frontier is that it's still in its early stages (v.80) and some things are not quite there yet, including some of the weapon animations, but more importantly the player base is just not present. Usually there are only one or two people online. Those people are sometimes developers of the game though which can be interesting.
BZ Flag
I will never understand this game's appeal.
Combat Arms
Oh, Combat Arms. Why must you taunt us so?
Combat Arms is one of a bunch of emerging, free Korean FPS games. This one is proffered by Nexon, who also brought you Maple Story if you really care. Combat Arms has some good ideas:
-Free
-Large selection of weapons
-Gear and mods to customize weapons
-Big community
It then takes those ideas and combines them with these ideas that you may find good but I consider to be bad or terrible:
-You pay for items with "GP" earned by playing the game (people who play more, have better toys)
-You don't keep what you buy; it expires after a certain time period, a day or week unless you shell out a boatload of "GP" for more time
-Server browser like an MMO instead of an FPS. Doesn't tell you pings or much else.
-If you don't want to pay with "GP", you can also buy some items with "NX". "NX" is a special acronym for a Korean phrase meaning "Real Money".
-Buggy gameplay and rampant cheating
Compared to other games, Combat Arms is pretty commercialized, stupidly so at times, and fairly broken. Seems like it could have worked out better if it was built on a stable engine. I guess the issue is that when you throw in an incentive to winning a lot then there's more motive for some people to cheat. Anyway, I'm not too fond of Combat Arms but some people love it.
Hidden & Dangerous
I guess it's tactical, or something. Think of this as a primitive SOCOM for PC. My main issue with this is that it's ancient, I'm not interested in single-player much, and the campaign works like this:
-Go forward until you get killed.
-Figure out who killed you and where they were standing.
-Kill them next time instead.
-Repeat.
Nexuiz
I haven't tried this one, but it seems worthy of mention at the least.
Tremulous
Another sci-fi shooter. This one has some unique features, and includes building resources as well as fighting. I didn't play it very much, mainly because I didn't like the gameplay a lot. Generally, people will join the human team whenever possible, so you'll find yourself playing as alien quite a bit. Some things, like being able to crawl on walls as some species, are cool though.
This runs on the Quake 3 engine so it's good on Windows and Linux, and has dated but "ok" graphics.
Urban Terror
I like this game a lot do you want to play this game I like to play this game I think you should play it too.
Shooter with modern weapons and gear. Quake 3 engine means fairly simple graphics, but it's all about the gameplay with this one. You can choose a primary, secondary, and sidearm, as well as two items, or ditch the secondary for an extra item. This is nice for trying out different weapons with different playing styles. I usually plan LAN games of 4-6 people in CTF mode, online games with 20+ in TDM, for the most fun.
Urban Terror is not really exceptional and it doesn't do anything I would say is particularly special, but it does what it does very well. In other words; average concept, great execution. The developers have managed to balance the weapons pretty well, and the movement techniques are great with walljumping and more allowing some high speed maneuvering.
Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory
Runs on a tweaked Quake 3 engine, class-based WWII fun.
This game has perhaps the largest player base of any free FPS, and its maps and classes are entertaining and fairly balanced. I never really got into this one too heavily, but it has a lot of pretty neat features that can be fun if you like to play on fairly large maps with a lot of people, in objective-based battles. It also has probably the coolest flamethrower of any game of its time.
True Combat: Elite
Mod of Wolfenstein: ET that goes for modern realism and also tweaks the graphics.
I loved this game. Probably my favorite tactical realism shooter all around, and does so many things right. The problem is, it never had the player base to really make it fun, and that just gets worse and worse all the time. By now, it's near enough dead. The current version is the best-looking game on the engine and the weapons are really cool, but really, nobody plays this game. I mean, there might be one person, but probably not.
War Rock
So this game is Combat Arms, but with vehicles. Includes the things bad about Combat Arms.
Discuss these games. Or other games. Or other things that are not pictures of women.
RSP on
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Posts
that game was my fucking joint
I played AA a few times back when it came out. For a free game that's intended to get you to join the Army, it's pretty cool