Warsow is a free FPS game based on the Qfusion engine that has gained the reputation of being a competitive FPS. Speed and movement is what this game is all about. Released back in 2005, Warsow comes back in the form of 0.5.

Requirements

• 3-D Hardware Accelerator with full OpenGL® support
• Pentium II(R) 300Mhz or AMD® 350 Mhz K6®-2 processor or Athlon® processor
• 64MB RAM
• 16MB video card
• 100% DirectX 3.0 or higher compatible sound card
• Internet (TCP/IP) and LAN (TCP/IP and IPX) play supported

Installation

Unlike OpenArena, Warsow comes with an installer meaning it's newbie friendly since all you have to do is follow the instructions and you should be set. I guess for more experienced players, they prefer the archived version of a game where all you have to do is unzip/unrar/untar the file and there you go. But the thing is, some newbies don't even know how to do that 'simple' task that we all take for granted. Having a installer definitely helps get more players to play your game.

First Impressions

I am a fan of cel shaded animation especially when it's done right and starting up a single-player game of Warsow just put a smile on my face. Although it might be too cartoonish for me, it's definitely not something you don't want to look at. I think the artists really did a good job with this one. I just hope they make more models in the future...when they have time of course since Warsow is just a hobbyist project meaning the people that work on this project don't really get paid. They do it because they like doing it.

Playing with the bots to familiarize myself with the controls and environments, the controls were very similar to simple yet awesome FPS games like Quake and Unreal Tournament except for one thing, you can jump on walls! That definitely adds a new type of gameplay for me and mastering it takes some time. For newbies, learning how to move and shoot is pretty easy but as soon as you want to learn jump tricks, the learning curve can be quite steep and so the gap between veteran players and newbie players is really big. Unless you know someone or someone's kind enough to teach you how to do stuff, you're going to find yourself getting fragged over and over again in multi-player matches.

Singleplayer

Playing with the bots certainly isn't a stroll in the park as soon as you hit up the higher difficulty levels. In fact if you start owning the bots in the higher difficulty level, I'm quite certain that you're going to own newbies in multi-player matches. But that's just the newbies...players that are quite good at moving around in all the maps can be a PITA.

I guess for me, the only purpose of the single-player is to get yourself wet for multi-player since after getting bored (or frustrated) with the bots, you might want to try fragging a real person behind a monitor.

Multiplayer

Having been labeled as an e-sports oriented FPS, I was quite surprised that so many few people play Warsow. Typing 'Warsow Gameplay' in YouTube's search only brings up around 55+ search results (at the time of this writing). And if you look at the screenshot below, there's just quite a few servers with people in them.

Finding a game server near you with players is difficult due to the lack of players playing this game. Everytime I start up Warsow and search for a game server I always end up playing in the 150-200 ping game servers. I can tolerate these kinds of pings since I'm just playing casually anyway, but it can get annoying when you're trying to frag someone and they just suddenly skip right in front of you.

Final Thoughts

The game itself is great and I only have a couple of minor problems with it like when I'm recording a demo it tends to slowdown even 3.5Ghz quad core computers but that's just me and most of the players won't probably care about that kind of thing. I'm sure the primary focus of this game is multi-player...however, the amount of players out there just isn't enough to have a lot of choices. What happens is that since there's not a lot of players online most players just flock around a couple of servers. Now that might be a good thing if you've already played this game a couple of times like I did. But if you're a newbie player and you end up playing on these servers, you'll usually get owned pretty fast and that might discouraged you as a newbie to continue playing the game. Unless of course you want to come back after you've practiced for days to kick their ass.

Ratings

Installer - Single file installers are always good since it lessens the chance for a newbie to make mistakes.

Graphics - The game uses cel shaded animations and they all look awesome. However their might be some people that thinks that this is too cartoonish and so it's more like a love it or hate it thing. As for me? I love it.

Sound - Jumping sounds and the boo sounds can get quite annoying pretty fast! I had to turn them off because playing more than 15+ minutes per map with them on just stresses me out.

Gameplay - Speed and movement is the name of the game, once players learn how to do trick jumps, they can pretty much dodge most of the players trying to shoot them. I was amazed when I watched a player do it for the first time (since bots don't do it), a couple of hours later, I was doing it too and as soon as you know what ammo to pick up and where to go, everything is a piece of cake unless of course a better player comes in and owns all of you. What Warsow needs is more publicity and word of mouth. The awesome gameplay is there...it just needs more people playing it.