Review: OpenArena 0.8.0 - 10/08/2008 by Andrew
First Person Shooter
I've previously reviewed version 0.7.7, which itself was a minor update of 0.7.6. Now that 0.8.0 has been released (on the auspicious date of 08/08/08) I think it deserves another look.
The change-log is quite lengthy:
- Better mouse control (it'd better be)
- Initial release of 'missionpack'
- Missionpack weapons added back into baseoa (this means NAILGUNS, PROXIMITY MINES AND CHAINGUNS in non-missionpack mode!)
- New announcer voices from Fuzztooth
- New player model : Sorceress
- New map: oa_bases7
- New map: pul1ctf
- New map: schism
- q3dm6ish retextured by TRaK, and is back in the maps menu
- oa_bases3 recompiled with fast water (should perform 632% faster)
- Classic version of oa_bases3 snuck in
- oa_minia updated
- dm6ish updated (retextured, and bots aren't dumb at the door anymore)
- New plasma gun model and skin from enki
- New sound effects for shotgun, railgun, and weapon switching
- New CTF event sounds
- New Kyonshi voices, courtesy of aeri_s
- Ayumi optimized, at the cost of the Jenna skin
- Beret greatly improved, in skin and animation and taunt sound
- Some simple stress and flyby demo files (intended for timedemo)
- All TGAs that had broken headers are now corrected
- Other stuff like random asset polish
Sounds good huh? Diving straight in I downloaded the 300 odd meg download (http://openarena.ws/files.html), which has grown a bit from the previous versions (0.7.0 was 250MB, 0.7.6 was 271MB). Being such a new version, you might not be seeing this in Ubuntu 8.10, Mandriva 2009, Fedora 10 or Suse 11.1 – unless they update their repos quick smart. All is not lost however, as it's a quick download without the need to compile anything, as you run the game from the directory choosing either the x86 or the x86-64 runtime.
Regarding the gameplay and visuals, I'll quote from my previous review (as it's unchanged):
The game itself is visually a remake of Quake 3 Arena, so any FPS player will immediately feel at home playing the standard game types (DM, Team DM, Tournament, CTF, Elimination, CTF Elimination, Last Man Standing, and Double Domination) but you're also able to play the same style of offline single person game that Quake 3 Arena has. The gameplay is (unsurprisingly) exactly like Quake 3 Arena. It's fast and fluid, providing very enjoyable fragging action. The maps and models don't detract from the gameplay either, a testament to the artists working on this game.
What I do want to talk about is what's new. Firstly, there are a few new maps, new models, new sound effects and a new annoucer voice. On the whole, there's a lot that's changed and the game is all the better for it. Some of the weapons sound a bit softer now (the shotgun sounds especially wussy), but I'm sure that's something that I'll just get used to.
One ugly bug has raised it's head; Creating a 'Last Man Standing' game with the new map 'SCHISM-B2' will cause the game to crash, with the error of (if you run it from the command line) “ERROR: Couldn't find a spawn point
”. Playing this map as a 'Free for all' doesn't cause the same error, so there's hopefully a point release to fix this.
If for some reason you haven't yet tried OpenArena, there's no better time than now to give a go. For everyone else that's previously played OpenArena, it's well worth the download to see what's new. If I had some fancy “HeadshotGamer.com recommends this game” sticker, I'd apply it to this game.