The world of First-Person Shooters has always been filled with titles that are trying to push the graphical bar on the latest hardware, but one game is looking to ignore the visual stereotypes and give players a world they can make their own. Starting life as a Kickstarter campaign, Guncraft is designed with the Voxel Engine at the heart of it, making it look like Minecraft has gone to war.
Going hands-on with the game at PAX Prime 2013, I was able to see that when they said that the environment was 100% destructible, they weren’t kidding. Shooting boxes causes them to crumble, meaning every wall in the game can be turned into a doorway, with the help of a few well placed shots. This concept seemed pointless at first, but playing through a match, I was able to bore through the map hunting down opponents – ultimately creating tunnels that soon became the firing grounds for both teams.
Visually, the game is simply just a series of blocks, giving the game a great deal of charm, but trying to aim down the sights of the gun did feel a bit cumbersome. This was because the iron sights of my gun were made of square blocks, much like the rest of the world, making target acquisition a slower process. Thankfully, the developers promised that players will be able to construct their own guns for the game, meaning this issue could potentially be fixed by taking a few minutes to customize your weapons.
Adding onto the concept of being able to construct items within the game, Guncraft takes the idea even further with its prefab system, that lets players drop in complete structures at the drop of a hat. Much like customizing your weapon in the menus, players will be able to design a structure and then place it in the middle of a match, making each game a mixture of strategy and combat mechanics. As I didn’t have enough time to mess with the editor myself, it is difficult to say just how much customization is possible, but the objects I did see looked to add a bit of variety.
Much like other FPS games, classes will play a huge role in the world of Guncraft, but they do have a class editor that will allow players to create their own. The one class that was discussed at the show, was the Architect class, who would be capable of constructing towers a lot faster than others, making them the perfect support role to get things where they needed to be, when they were needed. Sadly, while vehicles will be available in the game, players are not able to construct them ‘just yet,’ but the developers are looking into doing a way of letting players modify vehicles with a point based system.
The one feature that everyone knows will be the biggest driving force behind this game is the community support and the ability to create your own map for everyone to play. However, instead of having a flood of poor designs drowning out the quality ones, Exatogames will contact developers of any maps they find ‘especially awesome’ and feature them for everyone to play.
Fans looking for a game that allows a great deal of customization and variety will not likely find a more open based product than Guncraft. Be sure to check it out on Steam where it is currently available.
