War Rock is a first person shooter set in modern times.
Players engage in combat as the two fictional sides, the Derbaran and the National Independence Union, or NIU for short., this game is similar in many respects to other existing FPSs, but will not set you back a penny.
This game is brought to you by K2 Network, the makers of Knight Online, and as that game is akin to Guild Wars or World of Warcraft, War Rock bares many similar features to Dice’s Battlefield 2. Some of the main aspects of the game are:
[Note: this review was written by reader Sinkhan, a connoisseur of freeware and open source programs- The Freewaregenius]
- A nice physics engine is also built into the game. This forces snipers to compensate for bullet drop and leading moving targets when sniping over long distances. Player deaths run on rag-doll physics.
- The graphics are quite decent and are even comparable to other commercial games
- The game is easy to get into and has a very low learning curve in general if you’ve played any other FPS’s before.
- Players can enter a game lobby or right into the middle of an already started game.
- Players have a wide range of movement capabilities. Aside from regular walking, players can crouch, go prone, lean, roll, jump, and sprint with the latter three draining a stamina bar to limit these actions.
- Players can choose to be one of the 5 military classes being snipers, assault soldiers, heavy weapons specialists, engineers, or medics (the game’s only female skin). This is done at a spawn screen when one first enters the game or if the player is killed.
- For every achievement that a player accomplishes such as killing an enemy soldier or capturing bases, players get a certain amount of dinars (the in-game currency) and experience points. With the earned money, players may rent better weapons than default standard issue one’s from the game’s armoury for a certain amount of time. Experience points allow for the user to go up in rank and level, opening access to more weapons.
- The armoury is stocked full of many real life weapons from the commonly known M-16 or AK-47 to the G36 assault rifle and the P-90 sub-machine gun.
The game plays out smoothly and maps are fairly equal in most cases. I’ve many maps on both sides and noticed that advancing from either side seems symmetrical; i.e. my advance forward from the first spawn base on the Derbaran side would yield similar surroundings as if I were to advance from the NIU main spawn base.
However, this game is not without its faults:
- In some cases, the rag-doll physics is taken too far. I’ve seen bodies collapsing that would not be physically viable with actual human bones, tendons, and joints. Also, accounts of players being blown several feet away from a head shot by a sniper rifle would never happen in real life.
- The game has many prevalent bugs, glitches, and possible “hacks” that are all too often exploited by random users. These may include indefinite stamina, extreme high jumping, and the very annoying “grenade hack”, which enables a player to almost instantly kill everyone on their opposing team and have it appear as a grenade kill even though they are nowhere in sight.
- Games you play often earn you very little experience points or dinars. It sometimes gets to the point where you’ll wish you had paid for what is called a premium package. These rank in bronze, silver, and gold levels and increase experience growth rates, gives a lump sum of dinars and adds other special features.
- Any help and support you need can usually be found on the forums. There are things from FAQs to even combat tips and tricks from users who play the game often.
Overall, I personally felt that the game’s strengths outweighed its weaknesses. If you enter a game with a hacker or cheater, you can simply leave and return to the main lobby (The penalty that it mentions is just any experience or dinars you might have earned that game). The rate that you earn dinars is indeed slow, but the standard issue weapons and equipment aren’t useless and you can still stand your ground amongst others who have rented much more powerful weapons. War Rock is a game that’ll keep your trigger finger and wallet adequately satisfied.
Compatibility: Windows 9x/2k/XP/VISTA.
Go to the program page to get the latest version (approx 600 megs).
