Review: Nexuiz 2.4 - 26/04/2008 by Andrew First Person Shooter Nexuiz has been around since 2002 and has a strong following. It utilises the Darkplaces engine, which is based on the open sourced Quake 1 engine though the graphic effects are more akin to Quake 4 than to Quake 1. This has also affected the performance of the game as an old PC that can play Quake 1 smoothly might not be able to run Nexuiz at a playable rate of frames. Anything over 1.5Ghz with a semi decent graphics card (even a Nvidia onboard chip like the 6100) won't have a problem. My AMD 4800+ with a 7900GS 256MB isn't playable with everything turned on, even at 1024x768. This gives a pretty good indication of what kind of eye candy is on display here. The game itself is a traditional FPS with Death Match, Team Deathmatch, Last Man Standing, Arena, Rune, Domination, Key Hunt, and Capture the Flag on offer. Apart from the multiplayer aspect of the game there's also a single player mode where you unlock levels by winning matches. The menu system has been overhauled since 2.3 and it's a welcome change. When I first heard of Nexuiz I thought it was going to have the same feel of the old Quake 1 deathmatch that I played years ago on dial up, when a ping of 200 was the norm. What I found was a game that had, on the whole, darker maps and complex character models that made spotting the enemy more difficult and the gameplay didn't have the same feel of Quake 1. Then I worked out that this isn't a bad thing. As much as I wanted Nexuiz to bring back the Quake 1 feel of deathmatch, if it did then I would have played it once or twice and moved on. Nexuiz is a modern FPS that can hold it's own against the competition and it's a game that you'll keep coming back to. Nexuiz also allows for trick jumping using the laser (the most basic of the weapons), which enables you to perform rocket jump style moves without needing a rocket launcher or risking blowing yourself up in the process. There are some drawbacks with using a modified Quake 1 engine though, it's not multi threaded enough to take advantage of dual and quad cores (in it's defense, neither is Unreal Tournament 2004). There's no in-game voice effects, which gives the impression that everyone is mute. Apart from these minor drawbacks, there's not a whole lot to complain about. The game is fast, fluid and has a strong community backing. Get into it. 80/100
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