Warside Preview

As a rule, I try to avoid online shooters. I admit that I’ve had my comes and goes with some of them, but it’s mostly been an unpleasant experience. I don’t consider myself a bad player, but it’s hard to get used to the continuous abuse and desecration that my avatar always gets. I still remember when I played Team Fortress, Counter-Strike or Battlefield 3, and it’s sadly the closest memory to PTSD that I will ever have. I’ve been to hell and back, and you won’t believe the things I’ve seen out there, son. I’ve seen players being teabagged after being killed five times by the same enemy. I’ve seen players booby-trapping their own helicopter with C4 and dropping it in enemy territory as bait. I’ve seen teammates refusing to share ammo or revive as they’d long forgotten about their brethren, hypnotised by the heat of the battle. Because a man is no longer a man when he’s playing online. In these games, many lose themselves, many others simply quit and very few endure to see the next trumpery of a patch, promising improved netcode and more balanced classes, but some of us are too old to believe these promises anymore.

Unfortunately, this same idea of an always unpolished, unfinished and always promising game has migrated to Early Access. Many of these games stay in Early Access for so long that, by the time they get released and finished, they’re no longer relevant, and the same goes with many AAA online shooters. So yes, I’m very cynical about all these kinds of games, and I’m not too old either! As one would expect, I was very apathetic towards Warside when I installed it in my computer. Warside is a sci-fi 2D shooter that combines the best — or the worst — of both worlds: a laggy, unoptimised and overall unfinished bulletstorm experience. But hey, as it happens to be a trend, let’s imagine for a second that those issues are resolved.

Warside is a multiplayer free-to-play game based around basic shooter tropes. For example, as in many shooter games, you control a customizable character. This character is created starting off with four different archetypes. You have the Huntress, the Mercenary, the Guardian and the Faceless. They all differ in speed, attack and defence, but the most patent distinction comes in the way they move through the map. The all can run and crouch, of course, but while the Mercenary has a jetpack, the Faceless can double-jump. In reality, this matters little, as although it’s supposed to change the way you evade bullets, for me it’s been regularly easier to hit a target with my feet on the ground, no matter if they’re in the air or not. Anyway, the very few playable maps are generally not well-designed for in-air shootouts, more often than not clustering players in long corridors. The best tactic in these cases is to use other paths to flank your enemy from behind. Hopefully they will add more variety in the maps by the time of its full release.

On top of these warrior archetypes, there are five secondary classes so you can specialise on the weapons you want to wield — destroyer, medic, infiltrator, defender and assault. The most essential of them all seems to be the medic, whereas the rest are generally quite interchangeable. The medic regenerates your shield, so you can imagine how unstoppable a destroyer can be when launching rockets down a corridor and an always-full shield —a great bullet-sponge. As you level up — which as in any free-to-play or shooter, requires quite a bit of time invested — you can access more and more weapons and gadgets, like turrets and static shields, which contribute quite nicely and coherently to the variety of the game’s mechanics. Finally, you choose a faction to fight for; all of them very politically stereotypically delineated. I am still to discover what these are for other than to gain access to particular items.

On top of the difference in classes, the variety of guns, gadgets and other accessories is very wide. And yes, I say accessories because you can choose your own bracelets, your own high-heels, and your own matching purse. Well, that last one may not be exactly true, but I guarantee that, as the Huntress, you can wear high-heels to the battlefield! The variety in armour and weapons is definitely quite impressive, and it’s clearly one of the game’s strongest points, but it makes me wonder why they prioritised so much content over performance. I would have rather to have a lesser amount of content and less lag! I can assure I would have played this game for much longer! Admittedly, the weapons do feel quite different; from rocket-launchers and shotguns, to really powerful knives and tasers for close-combat. I was glad to realize how much I needed to swap weapons depending on the situation, and how I had to look out for my ammo constantly.

Warside, although being always a multiplayer game, has both PvP and PvE modes. For some reason players are much more inclined towards PvP — which is much more balanced —, making PvE matches very difficult to find. Of course, you have your usual team deathmatch and domination, but they are all ultimately reduced to bulletstorms in narrow corridors. There seems to be a co-op campaign, one that I never got to experience due to lack of players interested in it, but it seems to follow a story. The story is, however, unclear, and is supposedly embedded in the other modes — although very clumsily.

Lastly, I must say that Warside seems to have one of the few micro-transactions system that works, or at least as far as I’ve seen. Of course, the more you pay, the more things you’ll be able to buy, but these items are capped depending on the level, and many of them are purely personalising content. However, at the time of writing, Warside seems to lack variety in their mechanics and maps, while having too much in weapons, armour and gadgets. I tried to reach out to the developers for more information, but sadly, they haven’t responded yet, and it’s been quite a while. I really hope they’re too busy fixing netcode and performance issues.