Ten Ton Hammer - Taking MMO Gamers to the Next Level!

By Cody "Micajah" Bye, Managing Editor

Your boss is screaming at you. The laundry is in a 5-foot pile in your bedroom. Your cat puked on the floor and your dog is eagerly licking it up. Someone keyed your car and broke off your left mirror. This is the type of day that requires a good cool down when you get home, something to help you take your mind off of any stress you had earlier and reset your altered attitude. A game where your entire motivation is shoot whatever moves and blow crap up.

Luckily, the development crew at Pixel Mine Games must’ve experienced a number of those particular days in their lives, because shooting everything in sight is the major goal in Fireteam Reloaded, their recently released online action game. When I was given the opportunity to review this team-based shooter, I couldn’t help but jump at the chance. I’ve grown accustomed to Pixel Mine’s style of game creation – they’re better known for their low visual-style MMOGs like Ashen Empires – so I was eager to see what Pixel Mine could do with a game designed to entice the action / shooter fan.

Explosive Introductions

Fireteam Reloaded is all about shooting anything that moves.

To start, players must make a quick decision regarding which character class they’d like to play, choosing from the Scout, Commando, or Gunner selections. Of course, the three classes act exactly as you’d expect: Scouts are extremely fast and weak, Commandos are middle of the road characters, while Gunners are slow but are the toughest characters to kill. As I’m typically prone to do, I went with the toughest and slowest character available and dropped into my first game as a Gunner.

Although the developers also suggest that each class also has its own damage capabilities, with the Gunner being the most explosive character, once I was in-game I found that Gunners are at a fairly distinct disadvantage. With the bazooka as their primary weapon, Gunners can do little to truly augment their damage capabilities with that particular gun, even though both the Commando and the Scout get particular bonuses for aiming and range increments. Although they obviously have the most hitpoints, Gunners also have nowhere near the 1v1 damage capabilities of their gun-toting friends.

After most of the initial games, even against bots, I was on a 1-to-1 death to kill ratio with my Gunner and I was consistently at the bottom of the rankings. Almost as soon as I switched to the Commando avatar, my kill to death ratio jumped to the 2-to-1 and I found myself leading the combatants in kills and points earned. The Scout and the Commando seem fairly similar in the way they operate, albeit with different damage bonuses at close or long range, but I simply couldn’t keep playing a Scout due to the strange look of that character.

Like most games with pre-selected classes, Fireteam Reloaded doesn’t allow gamers any sort of customization or advancement options with their selected characters. The Gunner and the Commando are both the burly, Arnold-esque type males, and the Scout rounds out the character crew by being the only female in the bunch. However, out of the three, the Scout seems like the most over-the-top style-wise. The Scout model has a twiggy waist, proportionally giant breasts, a overly large army helmet, and sun-glasses; a avatar style that you really have to like to play the character. Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case for me.

The Trappings of Graphics

The Scout's outfit is a bit over-the-top.

That said, I still enjoyed the overall art direction for Fireteam Reloaded. With a visual style similar to what you might see in some of the older isometric games like X-Com or Diablo, Fireteam Reloaded pulled me back to my younger years where I spent hours toiling away at the computer screen killing all of my enemies. Like many low-cost online games, Fireteam Reloaded attempts to sell itself on style and panache rather than any sort of flashy 3D graphics. Even with relatively dated graphics, Fireteam Reloaded still manages to be visually engaging as long as you can overlook the lack of 3D animation.

Set on flat maps, your character moves around the screen using the standard WASD buttons, but in a variant of the standard procedure. Rather than being an intuitive “push the button that will move you in a direction” the Pixel Mine developers use the character and the aiming reticule as the movement focal point. By pressing “W” (which is forward in most MMOGs / FPSes) your character moves toward the cursor, while “S” moves you backwards and so on.

Personally, I would’ve rather had my characters move in the standard up-down-right-left movements on the character map, or even had a “click to move” option available at default. After a bit of finagling with the control scheme, you can find an option that feels a bit better, I liked the "Tactical" option, but even this control scheme doesn’t have the same sort of movement options you’d expect. With the mouse-move combination already in place, it’d be difficult for the players to come up with any other option that the developers haven’t included themselves. It just acts clunky, and the characters move at a pace that’s unbecoming for an action shooter.

All the Extras

There's plenty of items for you to buy in the Fireteam Reloaded item shop.

Being a team-based online action shooter, it’s important to discuss the four different game types that are available in the game: Deathmatch, Flags, Gunball and Basetag. For the most part, all of the games have fairly self-explanatory titles; Deathmatch is a team versus team killfest while Flags is a map-takeover type scenario using flags as the territory markers. Gunball is a “keep away” ball game, where you’re simply trying to keep a “gunball” away from the other team and score with it if you can.

If you’re a serious gamer and interested in all the bells and whistles attached to your game of choice, it’d be improper of me to exclude any of the information regarding the microtransaction products that are available to gamers. Like most free to play games, Fireteam Reloaded has an item shop that allows you to buy any number of the “extra” items you find in game for a minimal fee. I purchased a few of the extras – I like setting up gun turrets – and found that they were easy and useful, but not game breaking.

Perhaps the most intriguing part of Fireteam Reloaded is their voice chat integration. Using the well known Vivox technology, Pixel Mine has voice chat functionality as one of their integral parts of gameplay. Personally, I think it’s a great step forward in gaming when voice chat becomes the standard, and Pixel Mine is making a solid step in that direction. Combine that with a fairly solid company (guild) creation system, and you’ve got yourself a solid environment for social interaction.

At the end of the day, Fireteam Reloaded is a fairly average, free-to-play tactical shooter. The graphics and the social functions in the game are perhaps the two high points, but otherwise Fireteam Reloaded simply just acts as a quick way to blow off steam. If you’re a fan of tactical or online shooters, you may want to check this game out.
 

(2.5 / 5 Hammers)

Ten Ton Recommendation:

Fireteam Reloaded is a great example of a game that has a good premise but only average execution. Check this out if you're into online or tactical shooters.