Hellforces preview

First-person shooters that are being released around now will inevitably be compared to the immersive Doom 3 from id Software and Half-Life 2 from Valve Software. Hellforces, which is developed by Orion and published by Buka Entertainment, will be no exception as it is very much a part of this genre and with similar elements as those two blockbusters. If the Alpha version we received is any indication, then this game has the potential to deliver.

You assume the role of Stephen Geist, a man searching for a missing friend but gradually you come across something much bigger; a secret cult led by a demon called Baphometh. This cult has found a way to steal people’s souls and use them as power sources and then using their bodies as zombie slaves. Baphometh’s ultimate plan is to bring Lucifer himself to our Earth and you suspect that this could be a bad thing so you decide to stop him.

30 ways to hell

The alpha version features three levels (final version will have around 30); an urban setting, a hospital and a rainforest. There’s an impressive array of weapons at Stephen’s disposal; all the classic ones like handguns, rocket launchers, knives, machine guns plus some magical and futuristic ones you will get later in the game.

These weapons amount to 24 and are categorized in a Half-life-esque way which makes things convenient. The game also features items such as binoculars and motion detectors. You have more than enough reasons to use all these weapons because the game is crawling with monsters coming at you every step.

Although this is a shoot-em-up fest influenced by popular shooters along with the elements from the survival horror genre (the hospital is an example of this), Hellforces is also slated to feature some brainteasers and cut-scenes that further the story.

The monsters I faced in the preview were mostly zombies (lots and lots of zombies) and it does get satisfyingly gory with corpses lying all around while your mini-gun is cooling down. In the rainforest stage you have to battle through soldiers which proved to be much more challenging than the zombies, because the AI makes for a pretty good shot. Different creatures have different strengths.

The final version is said to feature an impressive collection of monsters (the current number is around 45 types) since you are battling in different realms, for example aliens, fire-breathing demons and werewolves (at least that’s what the huge thing that attacked me in the hospital looked like!)

Under the hood

The main purpose of the Alpha version seems to be to show off the graphics and they definitely look good. An important thing to note is that the version that this preview is based on is now around 3 months old so the game has progressed further.

There’s a lot of attention paid to graphics which is needed to stay competitive since Doom 3 raised the bar for this genre. The engine supports Direct X 9.0 and has a bunch of modifiable 3D effects such as dynamic lights, pixel and vertex shaders and so on.

Just for grass effects you have the option of setting grass density, grass view distance or animating the grass. There is also a realistic ragdoll physics system in place. As for audio, the game supports EAX 2.0 and although music was absent in this demo, the sound effects were convincing. (musical scores are however planned for the final version)

The devil is in the details

I quite enjoyed the attention to detail within the game, for example flies buzzing around lights, the black billowing smoke in the sky above, the little swaying of the trees in the wind, occasional graffiti on the walls and so on. The same thing applies to bullets; for example when they hit a solid mass like a wall they ricochet and yes, you can hurt yourself that way.

They also create different sounds depending on what kind of surface they hit; for example a "clink-clink" sound when they hit bathroom tiles, "thud" sound when they hit bodies along with making nice splashes and accompanied sound when they hit water. I could not break any glass by shooting at it but I hope that’s something that will be in the final version. There are however a lot of destructable objects within the game.

The game ran quite smoothly for me on my outdated system (AMD Athlon 1 GHz, 1GB ram, GeForce FX 5200) and hopefully that will also be the case with the final version although the recommended (but not required) specs specify 2,5GHz and a GeForce 4.

As an alpha preview this certainly has piqued an interest, the gameplay itself is shaping up nicely but I’ve always been a sucker for the story; which remains to be seen but reports are good. All in all, if you are interested in genre and you are hungry for more after playing Doom 3 or even Half-Life 2, you could do worse than checking this game out when it comes out in the first quarter of 2005.