ShootMania Storm (PC) Review

Once upon a time multiplayer first-person shooting games were FAST. They were fast and frantic, with "rocket jumps" and "quad power" and railguns. The faster, the crazier, the better. Then, somehow, like a mouse leaving a forest, a multiplayer shooting game found its way out into the world of consoles, onto the N64.

Then things got slower. After all, consoles have different controllers and a different audience from those first PC games and the PC rigs they were played on. Therefore, things changed. Slower, "realistic" military shooters gained popularity over fast-paced, cartoonish fantasy and sci-fi settings. Iron sights became popular, which slowed things down even further. Today, the shooter landscape is a great deal different than it started out.

Well, except for Tribes, but that's a different story. This is a story about a throwback of sorts, back to the days of hip fire, fast movement, and crazy neon lighting. This is a story about ShootMania Storm.

"Fast" is a good word for ShootMania's game design. Everything in the game is fast; matches take just a couple of minutes. Players die fast - just one or two shots - they run quickly and there are speed boost panels and jump plates that fling them around the map even faster.

It's a game designed around being quick, just like Nadeo's TrackMania racing series. In "Storm," the default play mode, the goal is to rush to the middle of the map to capture the pole, which gives points. At that point, the aim is to quickly eliminate opponents (for more points) before a storm closes in from the edge of the map and kills everyone.

It's satisfying in a very immediate, sensory overload kind of way.

Shooting in ShootMania Storm, as can probably be imagined, is the core of the experience. Aside from capturing poles and being the last person left alive, everything revolves around it, plus it's also one of the most unique features about the game.

It seems strange to use the term "unique" in this day and age when talking about an FPS, but ShootMania is. See, the main gun starts with just four shots, and every shot fired takes time to recharge. If all four shots are let off, the firing rate is reduced to one every two-to-three seconds. Adding to the tension is that the shots fire like rockets, in that they actually take time to travel to the target.

That's where the joy of ShootMania in fact lies. There is incredible satisfaction in going on an effortless tear; a jaw-clenching frustration in jumping out of the starting gate to be taken out by a single stray shot, and the brilliant tension in an 'end of match' joust between two opponents who have wasted their shots and are slowly pecking at each other, potshot at a time as their guns recharge.

It helps that ShootMania has some satisfying art and sound design. Death results in a Tron-like vaporisation, where players sort of just…fade away, in a nice heavenly light. Shots are very Star Trek-esque, with satisfying sci-fi blaster sounds, whilst skyboxes are nice and the lighting is good.

On the other hand, level geometry is only middling, and the music is largely forgettable. Textures are almost uniformly bland and characters models are, well, humans - fairly unremarkable ones. Visually and audibly, it's all a mixed bag; on one hand a pleasant enough environment to run around in, and, on the other, far from the overwhelming visual spectacle of something like Crysis 3. Thankfully, though, the graphics and sound effects serve their purpose and nothing is really detrimental to the experience, or outright offensive to the senses.