I’m back again with this week’s game review - today I’m looking at the FPS Tremulous.
Ok, what to say about Tremulous? First of all, show of hands, who plays FPS games? You? You? You? Good, so I won’t need to explain that much as I’m feeling lazy. Now, Which of you play RTS games as well? Hmmm… enough to make this fairly easy.

The first comparison I should (or perhaps should not) make is with the second Alien Versus Predator game. Given the game wasn’t too great, but in multiplayer the satisfaction you got from pouncing, screaming out of a dark crack and ripping the guy next to you’s head off, causing the player to rip their headset off. Anyway, enough of my youthful memories. Back to the game.

Tremulous takes what was most fun about games like that and adds a Real Time Strategy element to it. To begin with, when you join a server you have to choose either human or aliens. Simple choice for me, being decidedly strange for a human anyway I always go alien. Then you get the choice of type, one type of alien builds things and one runs around and slimes people. Wait a second… builds things? In an FPS? Yes. This little dude can build eggs (spawn points), acid tubes (turrets) and some sort of energy creating… thing to power the above mentioned constructs. Humans have an engineer that can do a similar thing.

This is then where it gets interesting. I don’t know how much effort went into balancing out the sides but humans are definitely easier for a beginner. You get a choice of a few different standard types and you can try and persuade the engineer to build you an ammo station to refuel. You have guns. Aliens on the other hand start off as tiny super fast spiders and have no ranged attack (no aliens do I think) The only way to hurt or kill a human is to wipe some of your acidic snot onto it. Lovely. However aliens aren’t that bad a choice. You might start off as a minute spider but you can run on walls and upside down (great fun to get your head hurting at 3am when you’re running on pure caffeine!) on top of this aliens can evolve into bigger meaner aliens. Each alien gains in size and in power. One for example can use it’s jump repeatedly to propel itself along tunnels at a great speed, as well as pounce and rip the oncoming human’s heads off. One thing you lose as you get bigger is the wall walking, but so be it. Trading a useful skill in for something that will maim the enemy sounds a fair deal to me.

Again with this game as with all open source games modding and mapping are actively encourages (infact it’s the only way that content is going to be created normally) and there’s even a wiki for helping with this, it is however more complicated as it can include non standard models, textures etc. There are a load of servers and most people don’t mind if you join their game. I didn’t even get kicked off on my terribly slow and laggy connection (woo, for once I have an excuse for playing badly!)

As some form of conclusion, Tremulous is a great game, it is of a very professional quality and runs very smoothly. If you are in any way interested in this type of game take a look, you will not be disappointed.