January 28, 2014

Rekoil is a mod-focused multiplayer FPS set in a world devastated by an unrelenting pandemic. The focus here is not on storytelling or world-building, but truly skill-based gameplay -- Rekoil is loaded with support for modding, customizable servers, and esports.

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Do what the name says.

Reviewed on PC
February 3, 2014

It's one thing to be inspired by old-school (or just old) shooters, but it's another thing to attempt to make one without a new or interesting twist. That's Rekoil, a "me too" multiplayer FPS that exists only as a tarnished reflection of better games. It's bugged, unbalanced, and has very little to offer anyone.

Things were bad right away, with only a few servers having enough players to make a  game of it. Of the seven modes available, almost everyone is playing either Deathmatch or Team Deathmatch. The Capture The Flag variants of Capture/Hold The Briefcase, the King of the Hill-ish Domination, and Rekondite, a mode that badly rips off The Hidden, have mostly been left to languish like withered limbs. So it's small. And though I'm loathe to blame the community for any of Rekoil's problems, it is responsible for one early change: friendly fire was switched off on day one because team-killing was considered a problem. Why did they have to switch off friendly fire? Because Rekoil was released without a vote-kick option. It's a temporary solution that perfectly fits Rekoil's consistent inconsistency: it's not a bug, and now it's not even a feature.

Most of the six classes have a number of main weapons to choose from: the Sniper and Shotgunners have a selection of five to choose from, and the Assault, Recon, and Heavy Gunners have six, though the Rocketeer has just the one rocket launcher. It's still a fair spread, but the twitchy movement means everything has to be pretty accurate or no one'll hit anything, and it's tuned so tightly it makes the distinction between some of the classes pretty meaningless. A Rifleman's Steyr Aug is nearly as powerful as the Sniper's Dragunov; you just need to flick the fire rate to single fire. I'm not saying that a scoped Steyr Aug shouldn't be powerful, but in a battle from one end of a map to the other, the sniper should  probably win eight times out of 10, and that's not something I've experienced. As an aside, the Steyr Aug is now my weapon of choice.

I should feel bad about that, but I tend to play the hand that's dealt me in online shooters, even if it means exploiting those imbalances. That's why I've spent most of this gun-heavy online shooter running around with a knife out: it is a weapon of mass destruction, a two-slice killing machine that gives you an added speed bonus when it’s in your hand. In maps like Subway, which is dark, underground, and full of corners and tunnels, it's an absolute riot to use; sprinting at an enemy, dodging left and right to hopefully avoid being shot, as soon as you're up close against a now panicking gunner you'll almost certainly win. That wouldn't play in Counter-Strike.

To be fair, it's not overpowered in all the maps. City Park, for instance, is a wide-open area where a city hall building overlooks a fountain area. It's a map built for sniping, and trying to dominate with knife kills there is almost impossible. But it's a map that's also home to plenty of other errors. The worst of these are the unprotected spawns that drops players into the action in a storm drain right below a balcony used by snipers. They can see right down into the area and snipe. The Prison level suffers this sort of baffling layout: it's an otherwise-decent space with lots of opportunity for different tactics, but one of the spawns on an upper corridor is easily camped. I've been caught in the crossfire between teams within a second of spawning, but most of the time my death there was pre-planned by calculating bastards at either end of the corridor.

I guess when you stack that up against all the other bugs and idiocies, that fits right in. The Shipyard map has two central buildings that could probably play host to a few nasty little territorial skirmishes if it wasn't for its magic windows that you can jump through. You think you have the space locked down, only for an enemy to leap impossibly through a solid object – full of glass and criss-cross spars – and kill you. City Park has a magic window as well, though there it's solid pane of glass that you can jump through but won’t appear broken unless you leave and then return later. There are incorporeal bins you can hide behind and shoot through, and in some levels you can see the shadows of enemies through walls.

Prepare for knife kill #244!

Prepare for knife kill #244!

The world feels like a wobbly facade that's been put up to impress a visiting member of royalty, and behind the scenes it's chaos and panic: it's crashed on several occasions, textboxes occasionally display programmer text, and mousing over weapons in the selection screen actually lags as the model loads in. That Hidden-esque game mode I mentioned earlier? I had a game that was so riddled with bugs and inconsistencies that everyone was just confused. Here's how it's pitched: one player on the server is without a gun and nearly invisible. He moves with increased speed and power, and the others have to hunt him down. Initially, my settings wouldn't allow me to see the shimmer that the creature was supposed to leave, which made it impossible – not just hard as is intended – to spot him. Then there was inexplicably a pair of creatures, despite the game mode stating otherwise, which made it blazingly unfair. I gave up when the invisible, overpowered killing machine managed to somehow pick up a gun, turning an unbalanced game into a slaughter. It's probably karma for my knife antics, but given that it affected everybody, I think it's safe to say this isn't personal.

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The Verdict

There's no excuse in releasing a game that's held together by good intentions. There was more to the classic shooters than speedy movement and accurate guns, which is just about all Rekoil has going for it. The rest is a mess of bugs and bad design choices.

Rekoil on PC
  • +Fast paced
  • Broken game modes
  • Unbalanced
  • Lots of bugs
  • Punishing spawn points
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