One Must Fall was a title released when a large portion of the action genre in video games was composed of 2D fighters. Capcom's Street Fighter and Midway's Mortal Kombat ruled the coin-op streets. At home, as console machines matured, publishers would begin issuing conversions of these fighter games; titles that relied on eye and hand co-ordination, as well as a good sense of rhythm and pacing to execute special moves and devastating "combos". Nearly a decade after the release of One Must Fall on the PC platform, we have One Must Fall Battlegrounds. To say that One Must Fall's release on the PC before was timely is an understatement. People were craving for fighting games on the PC. I remember a game called Stick Fighter. And yes, it was composed of stick figures throwing fireballs at each other with digitally recorded Street Fighter samples. That was how desperate the PC fans were for a fighting game. But publishers usually passed up on the 'sophisticated' PC crowd because things like digitized sound were missing on a lot of PC machines. No one could deny that beating the pulp out of someone else, regardless of platform, wasn't at one point or another a fun diversion. And Diversions Entertainment is betting the same adage holds true for September 2003. Unlike other fighters that had humans or humanoids pitted against each other, One Must Fall bucked the trend and put everyone in a mechanized robot. Now, the same motif exists. You have a cast of attribute-driven pilots controlling different robots capable of equally diverse actions. The result: this pairing adds a layer of complexity and should go a long way to reducing the effects of character favorites amongst players. A quick look at the cast, who range from apes and dolphins with cerebral plugs to a host of women with strange hairdos, suggests a wacky cyberpunk type universe not unlike the characters found in the Unreal Tournament series. But back on the subject of character favorites, I still haven't forgotten the monopoly of a certain few characters in the Street Fighter series whose simple cheap moves took over the entire game. This additional layer in One Must Fall should eliminate that. It used to be with the advent of Virtua Fighter that no serious fan would consider 3D-accelerated fighters a full replacement for the 2D sidescrollers. One Must Fall, after all, used to work in a similar level. But eventually, the 2D mode outgrew its usefulness. Like Dead or Alive and Soul Calibur, One Must Fall has made the leap to 3D but in a quirky sort of way. You assume a 'behind-the-back' approach with your persona. You're still put into enclosed 3D arenas, although they're all industrial-futurist looking, having the same gray hues and nitty gritty steel that make up much of the Unreal Tournament universe. But the vantage point is different. No fixed cameras swoop in and out for dramatic views. Everything is centered on you. The quick pace and arcade-like moves prevent it from being a glorified MechAssault. There are projectiles in the game, courtesy of a charging energy bar. However, the real difference is the departure from mano-a-mano matches to an all out brawl that can include up to sixteen players. It's here where One Must Fall begins to look a great deal similar to the Unreal Tournament series, rather than the 3D fighter counterparts on consoles. With a 3D engine, you can drop in bots at any time and mix and match human players in team or competitive game modes from simple deathmatches to classics like last man standing. When you think of the chaos of tracking more than a dozen players dancing around, you'll begin to realize why the developers dropped the fixed cameras fast. I've actually touched on at least two builds of the pre-release beta for this game. Each build is slowly improving on the previous one. The biographies for the many characters are still unwritten. The spelling mistakes are getting fewer and the AI is making marked improvements. Power-ups can trick the bots into becoming masochists, as they jump gleefully out of bounds while hurting themselves until they can reach it. But those are issues that are no doubt being polished for the game's impending release. Given the size of the developers, we obviously can't expect a revolution in graphics on the magnitude of id Software. But as I mentioned before, One Must Fall's vision of the future pilfers a lot from the industrially-influenced world of Unreal Tournament. Its characters are more detailed though. One Must Fall uses a different type of texturing for its robots to make them look less realistic. It almost looks like the cell-shaded graphics in popular console titles like Zelda on the GameCube or Jet Set Radio Future on the Xbox. The robots don't look like hulking masses of steel. Rather, they seem more nimble, like the robots in cartoons and anime. The arenas' settings range from one extreme to the next, juxtaposing the futurist look amongst an assortment of natural (and potentially hazardous) environments. I was pleased that One Must Fall continues to carry one of its old trademarks. The synthesized techno that resonated in the original will be making a comeback. Is it a sequel? A remake? Or just a new fighting game that is assuming a household name? More of the game has to be seen to in order to make a judgment like that. But rest assured, with the action genre now filled with Tomb Raider-esque platform games and fighting titles moved to the sidelines, the One Must Fall franchise reputation will be put to the test when Battlegrounds is released. Questions or comments about the upcoming release of One Must Fall: Battlegrounds for the PC? Talk to us! [ E-Mail Lawrence Wong ] [ Comment in our Forums ]

Copyright (c) 1998-2009 ~ Game Over Online Incorporated ~ All Rights Reserved
Game Over Online Privacy Policy