The freedom to be a jerk in Ace of Spades is at once incredibly refreshing and slightly nauseating. It makes me feel ever so guilty. Given the option to descend underneath the field of battle, shovelling away, only to pop up behind enemy lines with a bunch of bullets and a bunch of targets, I’ll take that liberty every single time. Ace of Spades is a game where front lines only exist so you can completely ignore them.
Taking cues from Minecraft, Ace of Spades thrusts you into a block-based world where everything can be mined, dug out, or built. Only instead of trying to erect that five story wang you always said would be your greatest artistic achievement, here the aim of the game is to obliterate the enemy team through a mix of teamwork, construction, destruction and raw FPS skills.
So it’s Team Fortress with a spade, Call of Duty with a trowel, Battlefield with a powerdrill, right? On the surface, perhaps, but as you dig a little deeper it morphs into entirely its own thing. There are four classes, and they cater to subsets of people, rather than just offering a different gun here or a special ability there.
The Soldier is the easiest to explain, being entirely focused on death by bullets and explosions. Armed with a rifle, minigun and rocket launcher, this class is almost entirely geared towards collateral damage, rather than anything more directed. You’ll shoot at the enemy, and they’ll fall down dead. It’s as simple as that.
It’s Team Fortress with a spade, Call of Duty with a trowel, Battlefield with a powerdrill.
The Scout has a little more finesse, equipped with sniper rifle and SMG in addition to the same basic pickaxe that the Soldier carries. This allows you to dissemble the environment one cube at a time, which can be slow going if you want to get anywhere. But luckily the sniper rifle means you don’t really have to rely on basic tools to start racking up kills. Just sit at the back and provide support fire, and you’ll do just fine.
It’s with the introduction of the Engineer that things start to veer away from the norm. The shovel obliterates blocks at a rate of knots, allowing for fast destruction of the landscape to better build trenches, underground bases and emplacements. Add to this an entirely defensive loadout of mines, sentry guns and a powerful shotgun and you get the idea: the Engineer sits at the base and turns it from an isolated hill into a fortress.
None of those was my favourite, though. That would be the Miner, whose only offensive weapon is the same shoddy rifle that the Soldier has as a backup. But everything else they carry, from the shovel to the truly ludicrous Drill Launcher, is geared towards cutting vast swathes out of the map and creating alternate routes through the ground itself. It’s all about subverting the expectations of the enemy, playing mind games with them as you riddle everything beneath their feet with warrens full of dead ends and alternate routes.
The Drill Launcher can create a back door that didn’t exist a moment ago
A quick word about that Drill Launcher: it fires a large drill bit that wipes out a 3x3 square in a long line ahead of you. It’ll make you an instant tunnel, or carve a huge hole in the enemy’s defences. It’ll create a back door that didn’t exist a moment ago. It’s genius, and something that instantly makes the Miner more interesting than any trite gun-carrying dogsbody.
Those are the ingredients, and when you bring them together Ace of Spades turns into a delicious mix of carnage. Balance might be all over the place, with certain guns seeming wildly powerful compared to some surprisingly weak entries, and headshots on players who are approximately 40% head might not be the best idea, but the hilarious violence wreaked on the landscape makes those quirks worth enduring.
A huge amount of effort has gone into creating some genuinely pretty maps, from Lunar Bases to Aztec Jungles, but none of that matters when five minutes into the game they’re only so much rubble. Mountains turn into transit hubs, filled with rough pathways hewn out by overeager miners. Any structures are rendered ruins through a mix of explosives, gunfire and the posthumous detonation of dozens of deaths. And then there’s everything that the players create.
Everyone has access to two types of blocks: normal building types and light-emitting torch blocks. Both can be used to quickly create some cover, or patch up holes in your recently-bombarded walls. Advanced techniques can be used to create bridges and ladders, and this is the one area in which Minecraft can really prep you for battle. On top of this every class can create prefab structures, and while the demo we played had the same for every class, at launch they’ll have class-unique structures available. It means you can toss up a fortification in an instant, providing you with some cover and helping rebuild the devastated landscape.
It’s easy to underestimate how much of an impact that can have on a multiplayer shooter, and how much it makes it feel fresh, new and exciting. Being able to sneak around under your opponent’s feet is a special kind of thrill, but even just beating a hasty retreat when you’re pinned down by digging through the ground like Fantastic Mr Fox is an option that no other games provide.
In addition to the normal suite of multiplayer modes there’s also Zombie Hunt, which pits one player as the eponymous zombie against a group of survivors. If anyone is slain by the zombie they’ll turn, with the twist being that zombies can dig through just about anything with alarming alacrity. It means those perfect defences you just spent ten minutes constructing are worth naught if the zombie decides to come out of the goddamned wall. It’s consistently terrifying, especially as the map is progressively destroyed through each round.
Launching next month, Ace of Spades is looking to be something entirely different from anything else this year, a truly indie effort that’s taken lessons learned by Minecraft and applied them in a totally different scenario. With added Steam Workshop support and a reasonable price point, it’s going to be extremely hard to resist.
Phill Cameron is a freelance journalist who gets an unhealthy amount of pleasure watching tiny men die tiny deaths. You can follow him on Twitter and IGN.
Source : ign[dot]com
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