Reviewed: April 30, 2007
Reviewed by: Ansel Newcome - Beill
Publisher
K2 Network (Online)
Elephant Entertainment (Retail)
Developer
Dream Execution
Released: February 8, 2007
Genre: Online FPS
Players: 1-32
ESRB: Teen
5
6
4
4
5.4
System Requirements
Recommended System
Screenshots (Click Image for Gallery)
Military shooters in today’s game market are generally a dime a dozen, with a mere handful in this genre doing something different to set itself apart in some way. One of the of the more recent experiments in this genre is Elephant Entertainment’s War Rock, an exclusively online multiplayer shooter, set in a fictitious modern combat environment.
War Rock was originally released as a free online client during its beta stages and the core game can still be downloaded from the game’s web site free of charge. But more recently, War Rock has turned itself into a boxed retail product to be bought from store shelves.
The game centers around a conflict between two fictitious, completely identical military factions, the Derbaran army and the National independence union. The battles between these two forces are caused by the struggle to control what is presumably a meteorite called…you guessed it, the war rock. While the story is quite shallow, it is free of any sort of real world political bias, allowing all sorts of battles to be waged on pretty much any battlefield and shoot the guy in a different uniform in the face.
The overall style of War rock tends to mimic that of other shooters in the genre, implementing a real world armory and vehicles, which are all very familiar and straightforward in their purpose. But War Rock tends to be a little less methodical than other military shooters, instead focusing more on speed and fast action rather than planning and teamwork.
Before playing War Rock the player is required to register an account with a user name and password on their site. After which they are allotted a certain amount of dinar, the game’s currency, which is a principle that makes War Rock slightly different than other online shooters. Instead of charging for the game itself, players can choose to pay a fee for a premium account, which gives them both extra experience and more dinar, which the player uses to buy extra weapons and equipment. However, in War Rock, the player doesn’t really buy weapons, instead they must rent the weapon for a certain amount of time and are charged a dinar fee for its use. This concept sounds interesting until you run out of dinar and are forced to dole out more real world cash to gain access to the higher level weapons in the game.
War Rock tries to add some kind of balance to this system by only allowing the best weapons to be accessed by players with more experience. Granted, you will never be without a weapon in War Rock regardless of how much cash you have, as all players have a basic kit they can use free of charge. But in the end, who guns down whom will always be a matter of who has more money, simply because even the lower level costly weapons drastically out-class any of the free weapons and definitely gives paying players the edge in combat.
Players in War Rock are given 3 different sets of maps to play on depending on their preference of shooter. These different maps try to appeal to the broad spectrum of shooter fans by borrowing many concepts from other games in the military shooter genre. The smaller maps will immediately draw the counterstrike audience, whereas the larger scale control point, vehicular battles are more reminiscent of the battlefield series. There are also some medium sized maps that find a comfortable place between the two.
The map design is fairly decent and features enough variety so that they don’t all look the same. They do support a good amount of players and allow for some pretty furious “twitch” shooter action in some cases. The maps do carry some different themes along with them as well, such as ground pounding with tanks, massive aerial dogfights, or infantry based urban combat.
The basic concept behind all of the maps in War Rock is a class system, which uses 5 different soldier types, and a ticket system, which determines how many respawns your team has left. The lone exception to this is the bomb placement map which disables respawns, playing out more along the lines of counterstrike where the player is eliminated from round when they are killed and must wait for another round to begin before respawning.
The idea of the class system is something that has been carried over from many games including the battlefield series, and was used as a means to encourage teamwork as all the classes complimented each other or were used to counter a specific type of unit. However this doesn’t work too well in War Rock’s case, as in the smaller maps, everyone tends to veer towards the assault class simply because there are no vehicles to counter them.
Whereas in the larger maps, using infantry at all seems pointless, as some of the vehicles roaming around the map, such as the tanks, are hideously overpowered and don’t really require any infantry support. can only really be countered by other tanks. This isn’t to say that the vehicular action can get pretty intense, it is definitely fun to roll around in tanks, blowing through everything in your path, but this does tend to get a little one sided as usually the side with more vehicles can win with little effort.
The balance issues continue in the larger battlefield maps. As one might expect, these use many of the features from the battlefield series, such as control points and ammo and repair stations. These are features that were originally used in the battlefield series, but were ultimately removed as they caused the teamwork ideal to go downhill.
The control points in War Rock all take the same amount of time to capture, and the ammo and repair stations allow the player to pretty much take care of themselves without the help of the various classes. With a broken class system, non-functional squad, voice over Internet, or clan support, War Rock forces the player to become little more than a lone wolf on the chaotic battlefields.
While some of these concepts are certainly tried and true ideas, War Rock doesn’t really come through in effectively implementing all of them in the game as a whole, over-extending itself to the point of having some features that are broken by trying to give every shooter player exactly what they want resulting in some annoying bugs and all too frequent crashes.
Being available for a free download, I came into War Rock not expecting much in the graphic department, but was not terribly displeased about what I saw. While the player models looked slightly dated, and the rag doll physics felt like a throwback to Unreal 2003, however the vehicle models, with a couple of exceptions, were quite sharp.
War Rock does support an impressive range of resolutions and effects, such as motion blur and depth of field. None of these features are particularly taxing on your system, but can be changed to improve performance if
The sound effects in War Rock are essentially what you would expect from a military shooter but fall a little shy of being really noticeable. You’re given the usual slew of gunshots and explosions and screams of agony, but these all tend to sound the same after awhile and nothing really stands out, leaving the combat sometimes come off sounding flat instead of intense.
The music also tends to get a little repetitive as the score for War Rock is composed of about 3 different tracks which all sound the same, the music is really bland enough to make you turn it off altogether and play your own stuff in the background instead.
As I had mentioned before, War Rock was originally released as a free game, and can still be downloaded and played to its full extent absolutely free of charge. However, everything in this game tends to take a complete nosedive once you attach a mandatory 30 dollar price tag to it, as seen with the retail version.
The boxed version, when compared to the downloadable counterpart, doesn’t offer much more in terms of game play. The boxed version includes a map book, a manual, a pair of shoddy dog-tags, and a premium member subscription. This may sound tempting, but consider that the same in-game features could be bought for less online, and you have an almost entirely redundant boxed version of a game.
For those of you who do plan to actually purchase this game, you might want to consider WHERE you buy it, as the publishers are including specific, special weapon with the game based on the store or website where you place your order.
- Want an exclusive M60 Machine Gun? Then get your copy at Best Buy.
- A big bad ol' Gatling gun more your style? Get yours at Gamestop or EB Canada.
- Participating Wal-Marts in the US and Canada will hook you up with a G36D Sub Machine Gun!
- Fancy yourself a sniper? Get your copy of War Rock at Target and snipe away with your very own AI AW Rifle!
- Future Shop gives you a Minimini Machine Gun
- Amazon.com and others will fill your weapon slot with a Famas Submachine Gun.
War Rock is a game that tries many things, but excels in none. It borrows many features from other games to make itself playable and carries with it a very low-budget feel, but is somewhat excusable, considering the game is free. That being said, as a free, unlimited, online shooter, War Rock fits the bill quite well, however the more money you put into it, the more you will begin to see its flaws.
As a free downloadable game, War Rock is easy to recommend to anybody fond of the shooter genre, and you can bump the gameplay, value, and overall scores a full 2 points, but as a retail game, War Rock turns into a mediocre waste of both time and money.