NEXUIZ SINGLE PLAYER PC
NEXUIZ SINGLE PLAYER SERIES

Maps based on crumbling ruins and futuristic societies are easily handled, while the different types of foliage and grass scattered throughout certain levels appear as good here as they do in a title like Halo: Reach. The game runs on CryEngine3, and consistently looks beautiful. You’re constantly going through portals, stepping on jumps, and traversing multiple floors to find opponents, and the frame rate never stutters even in the most intense moments where all eight players are fighting in a small area. You can play up to four-on-four matches, and the attention to detail from developer Illfonic shines through as the game becomes more frantic. Expect every firefight to turn into a jumping battle – in an age of sniping, weapon drops, and knives-in-the-back, it’s a bit nostalgic to just frantically fire and jump at online enemies. There’s no sprint button, but the game accommodates with a jump button that you will use.

Each match plays out in ten minutes, so don’t worry about lengthy battles – speed is the name of the game. Six maps are available for Team (Death) Match, while the other three are reserved for Capture-the-Flag. The various arenas all encourage exploration and are designed with a specific game mode in mind. Make no mistake – this is an online-heavy shooter. The single player matches have no ranking or statistical system attached to them, so apart from learning the basic gameplay, there’s little reason to return once you’ve practiced. While there is a “career mode” in single-player, it amounts to just playing against bots over the game’s nine different arenas. In terms of balance, the gameplay leans heavily towards towards online multiplayer. In a way, the lack of story focuses your attention towards the gameplay, but there’s a intriguing history here that ultimately feels like a missed opportunity. Beyond the initial introduction and a few loading screens that explain an arena’s history, the game barely refers to the story. Part entertainment, part pride, the arena functions as an important social event for these communities, or so the game would have us believe. After finally resolving decades of warfare through a peace treaty, the races decide to resolve whatever ill-will remains between them within a battle arena. You are, depending on the match, a member of one of two warring communities. The game begins with a short cut-scene that explains the plot and motions behind your involvement in the Nexuiz battle-arena. It’s fast-paced and attempts to fill the niche of ridiculously fast first-person shooters, but does Nexuiz do justice to its legacy?

NEXUIZ SINGLE PLAYER PC

Enter Nexuiz, a game that has come quite some way from what was originally a 2005 open-sourced PC game based on a Quake mod. While these are in no way a poor evolution of the genre, we haven’t seen a game come close to honoring and improving Unreal’s unique style in quite some time. They’ve been replaced by shooters like Halo and Call of Duty, games that allow for a measure of strategy while you wildly hope to land a shot to someone’s head. However, it’s been quite some time since these games were at the forefront of the shooter genre.

NEXUIZ SINGLE PLAYER SERIES

In terms of first-person shooters, no series equal the Unreal, Quake, and TimeSplitters games in terms of frantic shooter experiences.

Nexuiz single player