E.T. Armies Review

I have always been terrible at First Person Shooters, so it has been a refreshing week for me as I played one where I could legitimately blame the game for how bad I am doing. E.T. Armies is the first FPS from Raspina Studios, and I received my copy for free at the PC Gamer Weekender a few weeks ago. I played it there and thought that there was something a little off with how it played, but it wasn’t until I sat down with it at home that I realised just how skew-whiff the game actually was.

Let’s start with the visuals: this game looks rather average. It has some great screen effects, with the dust storm in the desert level and the rain effects in a level later on, but these don’t cover up the bad texturing and janky animations. And everything is a slightly different shade of brown, from the beige-brown desert to the grey-brown factory I spent nearly two hours in. Even the enemies are a slightly different shade of brown; at one point I wondered if I was  developing colour blindness, but it was just another corridor of browns and greys.

This guy has been slightly winded by six pistol shots

I saw a lot of these corridors: all the levels are little more than glorified corridors that occasionally open out into slightly wider rooms. In these wider rooms, the game sometimes presents you with what would appear to be a meaningful choice, in the form of multiple objectives. So far, the “objectives” have been “press E on a thing to play a canned animation of your dude placing C4 on the thing and then blow it up”.

Instead of the game reacting to which one you performed the canned animation on and getting the AI teammates to do the other one, it insists that you’re the best man for the job and that you should go and do it. This often involves trudging through the same environment on the other side of the room, shooting the same enemies and just repeating yourself. I get the appeal of “One Man Army” roles in games, but I got bored playing Monotony Simulator: FPS Edition.

Speaking of the AI, this game could use some. I mean, it has some very basic path-finding, but the AI isn’t really aware of anything in the world. Enemies and allies alike will just fire into cover because that’s where their target is, and in the case of the enemies the target is always the player. I’ve never actually seen the AI hit a target that isn’t me yet: The snipers auto lock on, with the laser sight actually pointing at me before the aiming animation plays, and there are some flying droids with double machine guns that will just sit somewhere in the sky and fire in long bursts at whatever box I chose to hide behind this time.

Wild lens flares in their natural environment

All that adds up to what can be a pretty frustrating experience. I would get stuck on one sequence because there was just too many enemies, and despite having the healing powers of Wolverine, my body would be disintegrated in a hail of bullets. Particularly annoying was a section with a literally unkillable “spaceship” (which just looked like a scaled up version of the drone model) where I was focused by the full arsenal, despite normally being the furthest back and most in cover.

To kill the “spaceship”, there is an additional bit of kit that locks on to the flying murderbot but it’s very much a scripted event: it takes about five seconds to lock on and then the animation for dropping the headset plays, meaning you then miss the missiles-or-whatever-you’re-firing actually destroying the thing. Though this could be a blessing in disguise: the particle effects for explosions and fire look very flat and it’s clear where the repeating animation is.

The game has some pretty distant save points and no manual saving, and it doesn’t tell you where the save points are. I assumed it was after scripted sections and cutscenes but then, after quitting for reasons I’ll discuss in a following paragraph, I found myself an entire level back, despite being through a cutscene and half of the next level.

The invincible meat shield of an AI teammate

To top off this cake of frustrations with the cherry of PC gaming, the game kept giving me headaches because its Field Of View was too low for me to comfortably play for more than an hour. I like playing at around 95-100, and this game runs with a FOV of 90 which is not too bad, but for whatever reason it gives me migraines if I try and play for more than about an hour. I tried to change the FOV in the .ini files but it was automatically changed back when I started the game back up again. The developers, on the Steam forums, directed people to the .ini file, and then the next day announced that they couldn’t give us control over it because the FOV is being set in different places.

This causes me to not be able to play this game for very long without causing actual physical pain, which is actually a shame because I was enjoying the story. I don’t know what it was about because I was laughing too much at the clearly native English speaking voice actors reading a badly translated English script. I honestly don’t blame the developers, who are Iranian and did a pretty damn good job of making an appropriate script as a basis. I blame the publishers, who are Cheshire-based Merge Games. They probably could have done something to make the translation not a confusing and laughable affair.

This game also has a multiplayer but every time I look there’s nobody playing, so I can’t comment on it. The developer seems to be trying to rectify this by giving everyone who has played the game a free copy, but I suspect that these will either sit in Steam inventories, like mine, or be sent to our least favourite Steam contact like a random copy of Bad Rats.

So, to conclude, I don’t particularly like this game. It’s very competent for what seems to be the developer's first game, but the FOV issues mixed with the poor gameplay mean I didn’t enjoy my time with it.