Ubersoldier review

There is a reason hype exists. It’s natural for developers to talk about upcoming games which excite them, and the more promising it seems, the more talk there will be. And while hype can over-inflate our expectations, very few examples exist where the game in question was actually bad.

This brings us to Ubersoldier, a game which has flown in so far under the radar that there are probably grass-stains on its undercarriage. Worse, it landed in the middle of the games industry’s most overcrowded sub-genre; that of the World War 2 first person shooter. Can it possibly compete with the big names of the FPS world?

These days of course, anything that is just a FPS will sink without a trace. Far Cry set a new benchmark for gorgeous open environments, Call of Duty came packed with embolism-inducing frenzy and jaw-dropping cinematics, Half Life 2 had gravity-based gas tank bowling. And Ubersoldier gives you a time-shield - the ability to stop bullets in midair, just like Neo in The Matrix, and fire them back in your enemies’ direction.

Raiders of the Lost Story Arc

This is explained by casting you in the role of a dead German soldier, resurrected by Nazi occultists in an experiment to create the perfect soldier, with your power derived from the death shock. Unfortunately for the Nazis you are also forced to obey the first person who gives you an order, who turns out to be an Allied soldier storming the building shortly after your reincarnation. Cue yet another slaughtering of half the German population as you seek a way to stop the ubersoldiers’ creation. If you imagine Return to Castle Wolfenstein but the other way round, and on some form of mind-altering medicine then you might get the idea.

Of course, you can’t judge a first-person shooter by its overly silly introduction, to mangle the old idiom, as they’re all about how much fun can be eked out of head-shots, suicidal charges and exploding gas tanks.

The gameplay then, is...adequate, generally consisting of a linear progression through Nazi bunkers, labs and other assorted compounds, killing anything that moves. This is broken up half way through by a mission where you control a submarine, torpedoing ships and shooting down aeroplanes, which is actually the low point of the game.

More Uber Than You

You are occasionally given team-mates, but they aren’t particularly clever and tend to die rather quickly. In fact, the artificial intelligence of the enemy is fairly poor as well, and could probably be more accurately described as artificial stupidity. Many times throughout the game you will hear them shout “Rebels!” or the ever comical “Alarm!” and then watch as they completely fail to take cover or even move at all.

When they do move, it is generally to charge directly at you, firing ineffectually against your shield. Enemy placement is also bizarre at times, although usually linked to some elaborate plan involving falling explosives and your charred corpse. After your fiery death/reload sequence however they become ridiculously easy to kill, as they stand right behind said explosives. The results, of course, are always amusing.

The main problem though is that the time-shield makes everything too easy. When turned on, bullets hang in the air around you making pretty ripple effects and, after a certain strength (which is reached during the second mission) are fired in the direction you are looking when deactivated.

The shield’s strength drains while bullets are in contact with it, but is replenished by your kills, so it’s often possible to wipe out a roomful of enemies without firing a shot, either by charging up and stabbing them or returning the bullets to sender. In fact, a viable tactic is to shoot at the inside of the shield, look at an enemy, and quickly switch it off and on, thus dispatching him while remaining invulnerable. This coupled nearly everyone dropping health-packs on death, means Ubersoldier can be completed with only the merest hint of tactical consideration.

We Call This Piece The Fecalator

No FPS would be complete without a decent selection of weaponry of course, and Ubersoldier is no different. However you can only carry one of each type (pistol, rifle/machinegun, sub-machinegun, heavy weapon and grenade) at once and a combination of Half Life 2’s slow scroll-and-click switching method and a constant stream of enemies means you’ll rely almost exclusively on the sub-machinegun.

Strangely this has no bearing on the amount of head-shots you score - they abound regardless, with three in a row increasing your shield strength. Harder to achieve inside the time limit are the three knife kills required to increase your maximum health. But while your abilities improve there is a disappointing lack of increased challenge, particularly with regard to supernatural enemies, whom you encounter on a measly three occasions throughout the game.

In fact, adequate is the best way to describe Ubersoldier. The time-shield effect is impressive but the rest of the graphics are a slight let-down with overly repetitive facial models and a slightly cartoony look to the environments, lacking in realism. Voice acting is rather wooden and equally repetitive, with the aforementioned cries of “Rebels!” and “Alarm!” from your enemies and “I see Nazis!” from allies, just in case you were forgetting that this is World War 2, and a lack of the cut-scene lip-synching we’ve grown accustom to recently.

Like a Grenade in a China Shop

The most interesting thing about Ubersoldier is its physics engine. Many recent games have had realistic physics for some, but not all objects - like F.E.A.R.’s immobile office chairs - so it’s nice to see Ubersoldier’s approach. While most objects aren’t breakable, everything except walls, floors and ceilings are movable. After one episode involving a small room, an exploding barrel and a grenade I discovered a German soldier gratifyingly squished beneath a fallen cupboard. Even bullets are treated as physical objects, and walking up to a wall with some on your shield will cause them to fall to the floor.

However that is not enough to sell a game these days. Ubersoldier has been made with some interesting ideas (although the choice of a WW2 setting seems strange considering the crowdedness of the genre and the nature of the story), but the execution of these ideas is far from perfect. If anything it’s a game for a rainy weekend - if you can stand the mindlessness and the Artificial Stupidity - because it won’t take longer than that to complete. But in this post Far Cry, post Call of Duty, post Half Life 2, post F.E.A.R. era, we really expect something more.