Posts Tagged ‘PAX’

"Team Fortress on Speed!" was how my compatriot described his hands-on play session with Global Agenda. I do not do well with FPS games being that most of them give me vertigo. I had seen Global Agenda and played through the tutorial at E3 and thusly hauled a gamer bud with me to PAX to play the game while I took notes. This was his first look at Global Agenda and he was still talking about it through the next weekend when I saw him again at a house warming party.

Although I spent all of my in-game time at E3 indoors, most of the maps were outdoors although some had some in-door bits, and I was pleasantly surprised to find that it did NOT give me vertigo. Although the bits of maneuvering inside a building did make me a little queasy, it was nowhere as bad as games such as the aforementioned TF2. The game Fury came to mind when I first saw Global Agenda. It was a game that MMORPG.com had given a graphics award to one E3 which subsequently crashed and burned due to unnecessarily complicated leveling through complex fantasy skills and builds. Global Agenda has much of the same game play mechanic behind it; Match-made, team based PvP on several different maps. That is where the similarity ends as Global Agenda is a futuristic sci-fi game with PvE as well as PvP components to it. With much simpler weapon systems and skill trees as compared to Fury, it was easy to get into and did not lack depth in the classes I had seen thus far - Mechanic and now Assault.

At E3, I saw was an earlier build and I was running about indoors in the city as well as indoors in the newbie tutorial which contributed to the vertigo. This new build looks much better, with better frame-rates which helps to ease the issues for the vertigo sensitive such as I.

As with my first hands-on session, my compatriot found the controls extremely intuitive. We (or he) played all three maps that were shown, starting with Ice Flow which was an Escort mission where we actually had to "Push the Object" - a huge piece of machinery. Set outside of a Siberian facility, I had time to admire the architecture and scenery. The second map was known as Seaside and is a three-point Ticket map set upon a massive drilling platform suspended above a storming Northern Atlantic Ocean where we had to win two of three objectives. The third was named Climate Control and is an Attack/Defend map set within the mountains of East Asia complete with trees swaying in the wind.

The play characters were all level 50 and fully tricked out. With 15 points to distribute among the devices one could bring into the game, we made our choices of weapons and devices, figured out how to switch weapons on the fly and the game was on. Fast and furious, eight versus eight matches with a good mix of Recon, Assault, Medic and Mechanic on the team, the first was totally a firepower, brute-force match before players began to explore the nuances of their characters and by the third match, healing stations, bombs, force-shields and turrets were being laid and we were protecting our Medic! Poor medics… they may as well have targets super-imposed over their armor. We also figured out re-spawn beacons (which can be destroyed) for more strategic re-spawn points closer to the objective, and tried out close combat, managed to block and back-stabbed the opposing team’s Medic as he turned tail and ran.

To read the rest of this preview please visit http://www.mmorpg.com/gamelist.cfm?page=1&feature=3522&game=339&bhcp=1