Developer : Digital Extremes | ESRB Descriptors : Blood, Violence | Connectivity : Online | Genre : Sci-Fi First-Person Shooter
If a developer makes a decent, multiplayer-focused first-person shooter but no one is there to play it, does it deserve to be bought? Ponder this piece of Zen as we examine Warpath, a new, budget-priced FPS from developer Digital Extremes.
Warpath is, for all intents and purposes, an Unreal Tournament knockoff that looks and feels pretty similar to Digital Extremes' last game, Pariah. Purely taken as a multiplayer shooter, Warpath has its qualities; but those qualities might be difficult to grasp considering that just about nobody is playing this game online, days after its retail release. And as far as its single-player experience goes, it has one, and that's about all you can say for it.
The premise of Warpath is that three warring races are battling it out for supremacy on a distant world. There's the human coalition, a group of futuristic supersoldiers decked out in what looks like a blue version of the Master Chief's suit from a certain other first-person shooter that one might argue Pariah was an awful lot like; the Kovos, a group of mechanical creatures that look like fatter versions of the Cylons from the old Battlestar Galactica series, but with weird Matrix code running down their faces; and the Ohm, who are basically Star Trek's Borg, but without that whole collective consciousness deal. Each race has a couple of unique weapons, but once you play through and unlock all the available guns, effectively there is no difference between factions, save for aesthetics.
Warpath includes deathmatch, team deathmatch, capture the flag, and front line assault modes. The first three are pretty self-explanatory. Front line assault mode places a few capture points around a map, and requires at least one member from each team to stand in those points until a meter fills up and designates it as captured. Once a team has captured all the capture points on a map, they can then gain access to the opposing team's base and blow up its generator to take the round.
Operating System / XP / vista
System RAM 512mb
CPU Speed 2.6 ghz
Video Card 128 Mb