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style="font-style: italic;">This is my rifle, this is my gun...
Before you go online, though, the single-player "offline training" mode is a great way to get the hang of Warmonger at full speed. The game offers five maps – each with differing terrain and strategic variances, but all up-close and urban – and two ways to conquer them. "Capture and hold" is a race to a point limit. The more bases your team holds, the faster your team accumulates points. Team deathmatch, however, is all about the kills - the first team to frag x number of enemy players wins.
While you can entertain yourself with team deathmatch in offline mode for quite some time, you'll have to go online if you want to progress past supporting teammate bots in "capture and hold" and start calling the objectives. Warmonger's online hosting is done through GameSpy's Comrade client, so this may require an additional download and the rigamarole of creating a new account. If you have Comrade, I had more luck signing into the game through the Comrade client than launching the Comrade client in the game.
And it's at this point that Warmonger begins to show itself as a bit of a disappointment. Before I rip into the game, the fact that it's free to those who shelled out for the PhysX hardware can and should cover a multitude of sins, and it's really not a bad little shooter if your craving for the multiplayer shooter genre is quickly and easily sated. But, first and worst, logging in at prime time on the US – Virginia servers over several successive days, I couldn't find a human opponent to play against. It's always my quiet friends Dayne, Hermes, Lihua, and Maus, with one of the bots promptly disappearing when I arrive. Sadly, it's the same four "players" on all four servers. As to why humanity has departed the game, it may have something to do with the link to the Stats page resulting in a 404 error.
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style="font-style: italic;">In the summer... in the city...
The utter lack of humanity makes it hard to get any feel for the tactical side of combat in Warmonger, as does the fact that all four servers are running "Capture and Hold" rather than "Team Deathmatch," a format that no doubt has more room for clever PhysX-enabled tactics. None of this means that Warmonger and PhysX don't have clear potential, and I'd be very anxious to play this game at a LAN party or on a private server.
However, finding several other people that have invested in the ~$180 PhysX card might prove to be the real challenge. Basing my assumptions on our network's staff, true gamers all, I was the only one that had traded a PCI slot for an increasingly forlorn hope. It was back to trading headshots with Dayne and Lihua, and without some kind of critical mass taking up the PhysX cause, I think NetDevil ought to focus more on Legos than dynamically destructible objects. Though using that molded plastic trebuchet to decimate King Richard's castle into thousands of blocks and free the Lego skeleton dude... this might inspire belief in the PPU.
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- Decent graphics & gameplay
- Better than 90% of the free titles you'll come across.
- Shows the potential of PhysX, a solid proof of concept.
- If a concept is proven in a forest...
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Easy style="color: rgb(255, 255, 0);">Server Stability:
Slight hiccups on low ping server style="color: rgb(255, 255, 0);">Graphics:
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border="0" height="17" width="17"> style="color: rgb(255, 255, 0);">Value:
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Curve: 2 minutes nowrap="nowrap">Gameplay:
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(3 out of 5 Hammers)
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Recommendation:
