Shattered Horizon Review

Conclusions

During the time we had Shattered Horizon fired up in the labs and members of the bit-tech team were talking past, comments such as ‘oh you’re playing that rubbish space game’ and ‘oh that’s Futuremark’s game. Is it rubbish?’ were commonplace. It would be fair to say that most of the team and perhaps even a decent chunk of the PC gaming community had low expectations for the benchmark guru’s first foray into the world of game development.

While Shattered Horizon is better than we expected, it’s not without its problems, the most pervasive of which is the lack of variation and replayability provided by the single character class and single weapon. For some comparison, let's take a look at Team Fortress 2. Valve’s title features nine different classes all of which perform highly specialised roles in the grand scheme of things. What’s more, each class has about four different weapons, the majority of which are just as varied as the classes themselves. The result is a team-based online FPS of unparalleled replayability.


The grenade launcher attachment provides some welcome variation but the comparison in this department to a game such as Team Fortress 2 is non-existent. The scope and silent movement features also bring a little spice to the proceedings but again, it’s just a pinch and we fear that a whole handful is amiss if the game is to survive the many years that other games in same genre do.


In compensation for the lack of hardware and player classes, you do get the zero-g combat system, a feature that has been both well implemented and capitalised on. Spying the movement of an enemy walking down a wall, boosting towards him with your jetpack, firing an EMP grenade en route and then sticking to a surface to finish the job with a hail of bullets makes for a particularly satisfying gaming experience.

The challenge of getting your head around the controls to execute such manoeuvres skillfully is a welcome one. This is especially true as your rifle isn't very accurate and you cant help but feel there is a more than just a tinge of the old spray and pray in a lot of gun fights.

Some games are harder to score than others and Shattered Horizon is a real humdinger. The reason is that the zero-gravity combat feature is a lot of fun. We can also cut the lack of features some slack as the release price for the title is only £15. If whichever team-based multiplayer FPS you're addicted to at the moment is getting old then Shattered Horizon is worth checking out.

The gameplay is original, if somewhat samey and if the zero-g combat pushes your buttons then you will get your money's worth of hours out of it. Overall though, we felt that this well implemented aspect of the game wasnt strong enough to carry the weight or its shortcomings. Futuremark deserves kudos for coming up with an original and focused game but we'd want to see a good measure of downloadable content added to Shattered Horizon for it to turn into a fully fledged FPS of awesomeness.

Score Guide