Warmonger, Operation: Downtown Destruction

NetDevil has proven that, as a developer, it is not afraid to imagine new territories and take chances. Auto Assault proved that. For its next outing, the company is challenging players to think about having a system capable of running a graphically intense online shooter.

The game is Warmonger Operation: Downtown Destruction. To really play it, to experience it, you will have to have an Ageia PhysX acceleration card in your computer. Why? Because the game – much as its name implies – features particle acceleration that translates into environmental destruction that is major eye candy.

The game itself is the type of shooter that is not really new. You can have up to 64 players online in a battlezone playing three types of games – team deathmatch, attack and defend, and capture and hold.

Where the game hits its stride, though, comes through the way the environment is part of the experience. A sniper has effectively isolated himself (or herself) in an upper room of a building. There is really no way to get there, and the duck and shoot tactic is taking a toll. Ok, break out the heavier artillery and blow out the floor the sniper is on. The debris comes crashing down and so does the sniper. You might also be able to find hidden passages in the environment by blowing out a wall. They are not always there, but if one is there, you can likely use it to come up behind the enemy – making for an almost eerie feeling that will have you turning from predator to prey rather quickly. After all, if you can find those passages, so can your enemy.

The lobby is set up to find matches, but you don’t always have to have other players fill out the available slots. You can use bots, which are not that dumb but clearly lack the experience and finesse of real players who are veterans to this kind of game.

Six maps will be available for action, and it can be rather intense. Like other FPS-style games, you will find pickups scattered throughout the maps and once killed, you respawn at designated points. The only problem with that – the testing – was that enemies could camp the spawn points, making it difficult to get back into the action.

After playing in several events, it is evident that this is a Quake Arena-type experience, geared for those with high ratings in the twitch department. Is that a bad thing? Not at all. Move, target, lock, fire are essential elements. And playing with a team that is strong in terms of tactics is always a bonus.

The controls are not hard to figure out and use, and the sound is much of what is expected. Clearly the drawing point is the graphics. It should be mentioned that the game was tried out on both a machine with the PhysX card and one without. The latter, sporting a higher-end motherboard and top-of-the-line graphics card, did Ok, but the intricacies of the environmental destruction really was evident with the PhysX card installed.

While Warmonger treads familiar ground in terms of the combat elements, it is clearly a game that is putting its eggs into a basket in which PhysX acceleration is the drawing card. The card was found online selling for anywhere from $99 (on sale) to $199.99. Yes, the card definitely makes a difference - not only in Warmonger but in several other titles that benefit from its installation, but that Warmonger almost requires it may relegate the game to a niche gaming crowd – those who have a card already, and those who are willing to buy a card to get the most out of the game’s graphics.