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

If Codemasters and NetDevil were looking too appeal to the perfect demographic at Jumpgate Evolution Gamer's Day in San Francisco, they shouldn't have invited me. For the past six plus years, I’ve been hitting auto-attack on various dwarf and orc melee characters, which is about as far from Jumpgate as you can get. Jumpgate Evolution is billed as an action-based spaceship MMO with first-person-shooter-esque controller responses. At first sight, I felt like a fish out of water.

But then I played the game.

Ten Ton Hammer's writers were definitely impressed with Jumpgate Evolution.

Jumpgate Evolution is not WoW in space and it’s not EVE Online, and it makes no apologies for not being either. Jumpgate Evolution won’t be for everyone, but it certainly has a lot of potential.

The Recipe

To create Jumpgate Evolution you need to take one part X-Wing vs. Tie Fighter, and two parts MMO, add a dash of EVE with spicy action, and season with PvP to taste. This recipe can serves thousands of FPS, traditional MMO and consoler gamers due to its minimal system spec requirements. NetDevil may be onto a recipe for certain success, but before we get ahead of ourselves, let’s get some more of the basics out of the way.

The graphics in Jumpgate Evolution are very well done, but in this day and age they had better be! The ships look great and there are a wide variety of planets that show a real depth of artwork. The jumpgates themselves look amazing, especially when you go flying through them. Don’t forget to check out on of the stars up close and personal, because these churning balls of fusion are nothing short of magnificent. Wear some sunglasses so you don’t burn your retinas.

The MMO basics that everybody comes to expect (but many developers forget) like a mail system, auction house, and guild mechanics are all included. In addition to text chat, the Dolby Axon voice chat will be integrated into the game. And it has to be, because the action is fast and furious and it is impossible to communicate via text chat for battle situations. You need your hands on the controls.

The voice chat system will allow players to join into easily formed groups when they enter a co-op friendly environment while still maintaining their guild voice chat. There's essentially a way to listen in to different chat channels and then toggle which ones you will be speaking in. So if I’m in a zone with a group quest and join up with another ship (check out the “No KSes here” section below) we can chat via voice while I’m still listening to what my guild is up to, so I won’t miss anything. Pretty slick set-up, if you ask me.

No KSes here

The NetDevil team is keenly aware that there could be an issue when there are many ships in a single area looking for a single target or set of targets. The Jumpgate Evolution system is designed to auto-group ships on the same quest to facilitate objective completion. Once grouped, players may stay together and continue to quest or go their separate ways, but either way they get credit for what they did together. It's almost like a more realistic version of public questing!