Time is running out, you've got the firepower, you've got the moves, and you're all alone. Barrage takes you into to high-speed hover fighter aircraft, launching you into outdoor, underground, and underwater 3D environments. Your mission is to aim, fire, and devastate everything in your sights before the clock reaches zero. On the surface, this game seems to be full of non-stop adrenaline-pumping action, but in reality the game seems to fall short of interesting.

Barrage immerses the player into a variety of environments from depths of the ocean to the streets of downtown Chicago. When the designers decided to build a game that relies completely on 3D hardware acceleration only, they aimed to offer massive, surreal environments where the player had the freedom to explore every inch of the area unlike the claustrophobic feeling created by today's first-person shooters. You would expect the graphics of such a revolutionary game to be spectacular, to say the least. Yet they look inferior to most of today's offerings. Mango Grits didn't want science fiction environments as in its counterpart Incoming. They wanted to project life, nature, and civilization as realistically as possible. Ships reflect off the water, mountains create dark valleys, and explosions light up the darkness. Everything about the game is modeled to resemble its real-life counterpart.

You sit in the cockpit of a futuristic hovercraft that is armed to the teeth. The helicopter like vehicle has the ability to go anywhere, underwater, underground, and above ground. If you looking for non-stop arcade action, then Barrage will be the game for you. However, if you are into strategy, you'll be quite disappointed. Your mission is to shoot everything that moves and if you want to, everything that doesn't move while completing your objectives in the allotted time frame. Nearly everything in Barrage can be destroyed, from the radio towers down to an innocent fisherman on the lake. Of course everything in Barrage also explodes exactly the same, redundant manner. The metal radio tower explodes into a fireball as if it were filled with gasoline. You have two basic weapons: the cannon and missile launcher provide you with unlimited ammo to utterly destroy everything in your path. There is no damage caused from collision or time to really gaze at the scenery. The game is split into five environments: Prairie, Tunnel, Canyon, Chicago and Ocean.

In the New England Prairie you're objective is to gain the five power buoys to access the portal. You start in the middle of as a train slowly passes by and fades off into the distance. A billboard plays to the empty roads from the village. From out of nowhere jet fighters scream over your head and tanks open war on your nimble craft. Each power buoy gives you additional time if you can breach the rotating density fields and make your way to the center. The race is on to complete the objectives and survive for the next mission.

Your next mission is to make your way to the end of the tunnel while destroying the anti-gravity bi-linear ultra isotropic flux generator (I have one at home, but haven't figured out what it does to this day). If you think this mission is simple, then you're quite mistaken. This mission puts your piloting skills to the test as you dodge exploding gas pipes, leaky toxic waster containers, chain link fence barriers, and armed turrets. Winds are creating by fans to blow you off course and gravity fields try to pull you back. Remember to keep all hands and feet inside the vehicle at all times.

The Grand Canyon will take you through the canyon, underwater and inside hidden caves. This is the level where you designers wanted you to truly see the boundless architecture of the game. Your goal is to the same as the first level, clearing all military targets to reach the portal. Be sure and take a look at the nice hotel and golf course.

Finally you're back to mass civilization in Chicago. Destroy the outlaw police units that have taken over and your own to the last mission. Be careful, it's a windy night with lost of skyscrapers to dodge. With all the wide avenues and many, many objects, this is clearly the best level for multiplayer.

The Ocean level is the best, last, and most difficult level in the game. You must recover all five components of the nuclear weapon and infiltrate the evil island to destroy the super gun. You've have got to battle jets, helicopters, boat tanks, guided nuclear warhead, minisubs, subs and missiles, missiles, missiles.

Although the levels vary in gameplay and design, the gameplay becomes very monotonous after the first level. A skilled player can defeat the levels in no time at all. The AI isn't terrible awful, but lacks any real skill against a talented player. Although if you just like to see things blow up, then the game will be perfect as long as you don't mind playing the five levels over and over.

War isn't made to be quiet, and the designers clearly understood that. Jet fighters scream as the fly past, explosions rumble, and tanks sending pummeling shots at your hull. It was of extreme importance to create a soundscape that was not too redundant, while retaining a realistic fashion. The speech was fairly decent and was adequate at explaining the objectives of the mission.

In today's line of computer gaming, decent multiplayer capabilities have become a factor into the "life" of a game. Barrage also supports two to eight players over the Internet, modem, serial link and LAN multiplayer in four environments. Playing over a 56k modem, the gameplay was fairly decent, yet it soon got kind of boring with open terrains.

Overall, the game does have some strong points in graphics and excitement, but will fall short to gamers wanting strategy and action. The game offers five basic levels and decent multiplayer, so if you want play a little shoot-em-up on a Sunday afternoon, then this is the game for you. However, if you're looking for this to be Barrage to be the next "Incoming," then keep looking.

Graphics: 15/20
Sound: 14/15
Gameplay: 21/30
Fun Factor: 14/20
Multiplayer: 3/5
Overall Impression: 5/10

Barrage....in another life this game was called Incoming. It is a futuristic flying simulation where you pilot the FreeLancer 550 through several different zones. The concept of the game is awesome but it fell through in many respects.

Graphics-
The graphics are only par for a 3D only game. I will say that the explosions were quite gorgeous, however, as good it may look the fact of the matter is that the coding on the game was obviously not where the money was spent. The graphics engine is so sub-par its not even funny. I have a 12 meg Voodoo2 and you would think I would get more than 10 fps out of the game wouldn't you? I could direct my craft straight up and only then would I see my fps go above 30. Explosions are abundant in this game, hell even the trees explode when you shoot them. Everytime you get hit you loose time and you get knocked about. It takes a few seconds to adjust which ends up being more like 30 seconds because it chunks around a few times until it catches up. I would expect frame rates below 30 on a game like Unreal but not on a game like this. Keep in mind I tried 800x600 but the choppy graphics was even worse in this mode than it was in 640x480.

Sound-
What is there to say about explosions. Not much. The game is one explosion after another. The gun gets annoying fast, however it is always fun to blow stuff up, whatever the means. There is some pre-mission speech explaining what to do and there is speech during the mission to set you in the right direction should you go astray. There is never a silent moment in this game. Between getting pumelled by missiles and running into trees there is always an explosion or crunching sound awaiting you.

Gameplay-
This is another part of this game that is seriously lacking. It does seem to support Force feedback, however, due to budget constraints I have not gotten to test this out yet. So I am stuck with my sidewinder 3d pro. Keyboard and joystick combo worked great for me. It is very hard to aim your gun, but your missiles seem to lock on to the targets quite well without too much aiming. You can fly around pretty much anywhere you want but when you reach the game's boundaries that's it. It turns you by itself which is a pain if your trying to outrun a helicopter or a missile. Again the poorly coded graphics engine takes its toll on the gameplay. Its near impossible to try and recover from a collision while battling the 9fps choppy screen too.

Fun Factor-
This game could actually be a great game. The concept is great, you get to fly around, blow things up, go underwater and go inside subways and tunnels. You couldn't do THAT in Incoming. It has a replay quality since there is always going to be something different next time you play a mission since there is enemies flying around just waiting to pick you off. The fun however is very limited due to the poor frame rate which renders the game almost unplayable.

Multiplayer-
The one redeeming quality to this game. It has all that you could ask for. Blowing up your friend, via modem, serial, IPX or Internet play. I did enjoy waxing my friend with a missile and then sitting by and watch him try and outrun it.

Overall Impression-
I have a hard time recommending this game. It seems to have a serious coding problem, maybe its because I have a k6-2/350 and not a pII/350, but a Voodoo2 is a Voodoo2 whichever way you use it. These are the games where I can finally put my Voodoo2 purchase to use and it is worse than a game that runs fine in 2d mode using my processor to move the textures around. I even tried using my Millenium G200 as the default 3d driver and still no luck. And that is even optimized for the k6-2 with 3dnow. Maybe there will be a patch for this game to correct this, maybe not. Until then I recommend holding off on this game.

Graphics: 3/20
Sound: 10/15
Gameplay: 13/30
Fun Factor: 15/20
Multiplayer: 5/5
Overall Impression: 3/10

Reviewed on: K6-2/350, 128meg 6ns SDRAM, Millenium G200 8meg, Creative Voodoo2 12meg, Creative AWE32 8meg, ViewSonic 21"