Picture an underwater research facility. Now picture the same underwater facility with terrorists who’ve taken it over, and you’re sent in to annihilate them all with large weaponry. If that tickles your fancy, then Collision Studio’s upcoming FPS Red Ocean will be right up your alley. The game is chock full of enemies to blast away and aquatic environments, so be ready to don some scuba gear. From what I experienced, the game does take the shoot-’em-up genre to the hilarious level, but it’s not overboard to the point where it stinks. Step into the boots of Jack Hard (groan, ok, that’s the worst of it) and fight the terrorist group United Arms in order to prevent them from blowing something very big up.
The first thing you’ll notice is that the visuals (powered by the Gamebryo Engine) are actually not that bad. The engine features several up-to-date technologies, including depth of field (focusing on something will cause everything else to be blurry), a nice physics engine (complete with floating bodies on water and rag-doll), some form of destructible environments, plenty of graphical shading, and environmental lighting. In some sequences, nearby explosions flung tables and chairs around, and if I shot at some concrete pillars they would crumble and collapse. I’m not sure if that’ll actually affect the building’s structure (being underwater, of course) but that could open-up some neat gameplay moments.
While the game primarily takes place in an underwater facility, the facility itself is huge. Naturally, this opens up the game’s levels, which include a mining facility, a submarine harbor, and a power plant. The demo I played featured some of the power plant, and the level showed off the engine’s lighting capabilities. Various swinging things allowed for the appropriate shadows to form and, thanks to the rag-doll physics, blowing away enemies from high places ended in a rather satisfying splat.
What FPS would be complete without weapons? I got my hands on some rather conventional weapons, including a pistol, shotgun and an MP5. I would like to point out that the MP5 was painfully weak, complete with horrible aiming, a very low clip-size, and a laughable sound effect. On the other hand, the pistol was very strong and very accurate (Halo, anyone?). One of the game’s unconventional weapons is a plasma rifle. It shoots green balls of energy that bounce around if it hits a wall, and easily smokes any enemies who get in front of it. In a nice special effect, bodies fly around if hit and the rifle’s alt-fire is a chargeable energy ball that can definitely clear a room if aimed correctly.
One negative point of the game at this point is the AI. The enemy AI is pretty poor, and ended up relying on the ol’ tactic of "I’ll stand here and shoot till I die." They tended to not use the game’s environment to dodge or move around. I noticed the enemies used voice communication a lot — i.e. said their position, location and if there were reinforcements coming — but that’s the high point. The game promises nine different types of enemies, but in the demo I only saw one type: generic armored guards with machine guns.
The game won’t support vehicles or any multiplayer, so Red Ocean is strictly a single-player experience. The game is currently available in Germany and will make its way throughout Europe and across the pond to the United States in the future. Red Ocean looks like a solid FPS that’ll provide what it was created for: plenty of off the wall action, but nothing groundbreaking. The oceans will be red with blood once Jack Hard finishes his duties.
