Would you like an online multiplayer futuristic twitch-based third person vehicle shooter with MOBA abilities and unlockables? Well look no further, although you may want to wait a while.
Crash Force is doing its best to revitalize the feelings of classic shooters while embracing modern online trends. Harking back to the arena shooters of ‘ole, you are pitted against other players piloting a variety of different hovercraft. Each has its own quirks and activatable abilities; from being a fast, agile ship that can pounce on enemies and release spinning blades to eat up their health, to the more tanky crafts that can pin enemies down or release giant vortexes that group them together for your waiting lasers.
The matches are fast-paced with the vehicles gliding over terrain at breakneck speeds. In this way it’s reminiscent of Tribes or Quake. Getting a good shot can be quite a challenge as you and your foes fly by one another like pucks on an air-hockey table.
Pickups scattered around the environment consist of ammo and energy. Ammo is rather self-explanatory, however energy acts as fuel for all your other actions. Running out leaves you limping around the map at a crawl, soon to be blown to bits by your energized counterparts. As you level up by playing matches, you can upgrade your available “skills trees” for each hovercraft. Similar to other MOBA titles, these act as small percentage increases to stats running under the hood; health regen, fire rate, damage reduction etc.
While together these make for compelling game elements, a lot of work still needs to be done. The developers have been readily patching and updating Crash Force, however this is definitely still an Early Access title. Just to name a few current shortcomings; there is only one “Lone Wolf” game mode available, shooting lacks impact, the visuals are bland and the hovercrafts blend into the environment, animations on some bullet types are bugged, there is very little map variety and there is little use of evasion/verticality.
As it is currently I was unable to get any human opponents and my entire experience is based on bot matches (which it defaults to when their are no other players). I had a relatively impressive ping from Australia, however there were still some jumps in combat due to lag. Of course your mileage may vary, especially considering real players and their connections.
This is a promising title, but in order for it to succeed there is a lot of improvement needed while retaining a solid player base.
