Project Hovercraft Preview

When it comes to multiplayer online shooters, we’re a little spoiled for choice: from recently released Gears of War 4 to the yearly Call of Duty and Battlefield selection, from new entries this year like Doom and Overwatch to the now classic shooters Team Fortress 2 and Counter Strike: Global Offensive. There is a lot of choice out there to satisfy your shooting needs, so it’s very important to distinguish yourself: What then does Project Hovercraft bring to the mix?

Promising to remind us of old school shooters, you play as one of five hovercraft classes in either team deathmatch or capture the flag maps. These five hovercraft cover the pretty standard classes: Assault has a machine gun, Sniper and Melee are pretty self-explanatory, Destruction has a rocket launcher, and the Mine Deployment is effectively a pickup truck that drops mines. I’d love to say that they’re balanced, but I can’t because nobody is playing this game.

The developers have been updating very often - fixing a couple things I brought up - and they’ve made it so empty servers can be populated by bots, but I really can’t talk about game health when the only experiences I’ve had aren’t with people. The bots also seem to be of varying intelligence, with some having perfect aim and others not really being able to move properly.

The servers themselves have been rather unstable, with my connection faltering after only a few minutes play. Even when I’m not noticeably lagging, the other hovercraft disappear or move around unpredictably quickly, making it almost impossible to play the sniper class effectively at long range. This isn’t helped by the lack of visual notification if you’ve hit something; sometimes the targeting reticule turns red, and sometimes you get damage numbers, but it’s inconsistent and it isn’t obviously clear how much damage the different craft can take to destroy.

I also found that Project Hovercraft needs a lot of optimisation, because I found the only way I could get the game above 60fps was with everything on the lowest settings with a laptop that can run more intensive games at higher settings. That said, performance did improve over the course of a couple patches as the servers were improved and updated.

Project Hovercraft has a long way to go before it can stand up to the much bigger online shooters out there, but it certainly feels unique. It’s one of the slower shooters I’ve played, with each craft taking a few shots to destroy and nothing moving especially fast. With the capture the flag maps in the game already, I can see the game developing very interesting tactics assuming that the player base increases.