Hellforces preview

Hellforces is an action-intensive FPS which comes from Russia and is developed by Orion and published by Buka Entertainment. You assume the role of Stephen Geist, a former Task Force hotshot, on a search 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 while everyone else tries to stop you.

First things first

Being the nice guy that I am; I’ll summarize my take on the Hellforces pre-release so you won’t have to read my nitpicking below. HF has good and bad sides: The graphics are good, there’s a lot of content, weapons and monsters; enough to satisfy most FPS fans. You will need a good machine to enjoy it fully though.

The gameplay is somewhat unpolished and sometimes annoying but there are also times where it plays well and you have fun blasting away. As it stands the voice-acting and the cutscenes are less than impressive but the story is so-so. It’s time for that old reviewer’s cliché; if you like First-person shooters Hellforces is not all bad.

Hardware

First off HF requires a good system; the recommended specs are 2500 Mhz, 512 MB RAM and a Geforce 5600 or similar. I was able to play on my 1.1 GHz and GeForce 5200 wreck by turning down most of the settings. To its credit it still looked fine but the loading times were insane.

In my former preview of HF I talked about decent graphics and attention to detail such as grass swaying, billowing smoke, and flies buzzing around lights and so on. Other things include a chance of getting hit by your own ricochet and nicely done ragdoll physics.

The game can compete graphic-wise even after being in development for some time and the sounds are well done although there is no music score.

Art imitates Life

Hellforces borrows heavily from other games and influences; there is not much you haven’t seen before. As an example you can find a few special items; one is called Trinity’s Sunglasses; put them on and you get a green-tinted nightvision effect coming from the Matrix code streaming down vertically (not exactly a subtle reference).

Fans of Max Payne will also recognize the story-telling method; mixing cutscenes and artistic images (although not as stylish). I could go on with the more obvious examples of Half-Life likeness (I wonder if the abbreviation HF for both games is more than coincidence) but you get my point.

Well, as they say, imitation is the greatest form of flattery. Actually I wished the developer had copied more in terms of gameplay rather than gimmicks.

The game does not exactly ease the player into his/her new surroundings; you are attacked by a large number of zombies as soon as you set your foot forwards. Action-wise this is fine, hordes and hordes of monsters attack you throughout and your trigger finger gets a workout using a variety of weapons. I see however lost opportunities to create tension and a sense of exploration which is a shame since the game world looks good.

You hardly have a chance to look around and see the nice little details in the game world. There is almost never that feeling of tension walking towards that next corner because there are always 4-5 monsters coming at you after every corner, behind every wall, window and from anywhere for that matter. With the nice-looking graphics it’s a shame that the game does not use those extra dimensions which comes from better designed gameplay. Here’s hoping that they will tweak the game before the European release.

Nitpicking

Sometimes you have to do a little problem solving or platforming which can also be a bit annoying because the game is in first person view making it hard to jump from ledge to ledge; you don’t really get a sense of whether you are in the right position to jump creating some frustration.

One more thing that is not very well done and that is the voiceacting. It’s a throwback to those old games like the first Resident Evil but instead of chuckling you are more likely to groan. I really hope they do something with that before releasing it to the European and American market because it’s quite bad.

Artificial Intelligence

There are quite a lot of monster types in the game and the AI has its ups and downs. Apparently to compensate for them getting stuck some of the monster types move in a strange, non-fluid, rickety motion and very fast. You therefore have these incredibly fast zombies which can sometimes side-step bullets. Maybe the story will explain them being so fast in due time.

Later in the game you have to be more careful against foes with range weapons because their aim is scary and the fights get more tactical. The impressive array of weapons at Stephen’s disposal should help with that. You have all the classic ones like handguns, rocket launchers, knives, machine guns plus some magical and futuristic one later in the game. The game also features items such as binoculars and motion detectors.

Final words

Again, this game has its ups and downs. There are times when time flies by because it’s fun but there are times when the game comes to a halt because you can’t find the right box to jump on for the next area and so on. There is still some hope since I played a pre-release version because it just needs a few tweaks here and there to get a lot better. We’ll see.