The 1990s were the heyday of the first-person shooter on the PC. Before the genre nearly wore out its welcome and before consoles had the processing power to allow us to shoot people in the face, the first-person shooter was alive and well on the PC. The problem with this was that for every DOOM there was a dozen shitty knockoffs, and for every QUAKE there was a Daikatana that quickly followed it to market. E.T. Armies clearly falls in the latter category, but not for lack of passion or trying.
E.T. Armies is a special game in that it comes from a small development team based out of Iran. With trade now open with the country, thanks to a new deal with the two governments, we can now get games that were developed inside the country. The western influence can be seen all over E.T. Armies, from the story itself to the gameplay elements pulled from PC games of old. E.T. Armies is a sort of homage to everything that is our collective FPS past; the good and the bad.
The problem is that while there was a lot of passion clearly put into the game, it simply doesn’t hold up even by retro standards. E.T. Armies uses the Unreal 3 engine, but everything looks bog standard with regards to the space marine setting when in motion. Clear influences from the Halo series were taken for the games overall art style, which isn’t a terrible thing to work from for a space army setting. Levels are all pretty large, but they are broken up between sections via a number of loading screens. You can switch between any two weapons as you progress, but you’ll always have your sidearm on you with unlimited ammo in case you run dry; and you most definitely will.
The story is where things quickly fall apart right from the get-go. Clearly there where major issues with the script and the translation into English, but these very basic errors translate over to the English voice-overs. I’m not one to knock grammar (I constantly make my old English professor sad) and writing, but there are glaring issues that a middle school student would even balk at. The voice actors just read the script verbatim without questioning a single line of really awkward dialogue. While this would generally be a real turn-off it makes E.T. Armies something special. Think of it like one of those bad “B” movies from the 1950s. Everything is just so silly, but it really comes off humorous because everyone involved is taking it so damn seriously. Still, it is pretty painful to see and read the subtitles.
Since E.T. Armies uses the Unreal 3 engine the game looks, well, okay. The developers built a fair looking game, but really cut corners by using a number of filters to hide the lack of overall detail. This means that screenshots look pretty incredible, but when you actually get to playing the game you’ll see the where the cut corners. Instead of using any fancy lighting system E.T. Armies instead relies on a number of bokeh effects that sort of lay over the screen during specific times. It gets the job done, but everything gets pretty repetitive even when in various areas. Following in the Halo motif you have regenerating health, but this too is simply an effect laid over the screen.
I’m not entirely sure, but I’ll bet a few bucks on the blood splatter just being a few PNG files of blood splatter pasted on the screen. Again, it works, but it just looks of out-of-place. I also had to retry a segment when on onscreen prompt would not go away after I completed the task without doing it the way the game told me. It told me to shoot down a spaceship with an airstrike, but before I had a chance to act I took it down with the Gatling gun I was on. Testing should have caught something like that on the first pass.
Audio, of course, suffers because of the stilted voice acting, but the weapons themselves don’t do the game any favors. Guns of the same type all sound the same, with only very minor differences. Your main assault rifle, of which you will be using 90% of the time, sounds weaker than one of those electronic toy guns you can get from the Dollar Store. It actually made me laugh out loud the first time a shot at something with the damn thing. Here you have this massive Gear of War looking assault rifle and when you fire you are wholly disappointed. It would have been more effective to record someone going, “Pew, pew, pew!”
E.T. Armies is the type of FPS we haven’t seen in a long time, and while many will praise it for this fact, there is a reason we have moved on from overly simplistic games like this. It should be noted that the game is far from terrible in any regard. Everything seems to work okay, but that’s just it, everything is merely okay. E.T. Armies is an important game, if only to see the kind of talent that exists from countries that we don’t associate with developing video games. But in the end it is simply a shallow first-person shooter from an age gone by.
J. Luis
@_ShadowGallery
E.T. Armies