Purge

The elemental differences between technology and magic have finally boiled over into all out combat. Choose to follow the technology driven Order or the arcane Chosen, and be the first to annihilate your chosen foe. Billed as a mix of team-based first person shooter and experience-based RPG combat, Purge looks at first glance to be an interesting, though not by any means new, blend of the genres: a bit of Quake, Thief and CounterStrike rolled into one.

Until you actually play it.

Purge looks to use some of the standard FPS elements in its game, with the added bonus of gaining experience for kills instead of just 'frags.'? Experience leads to better skills and more options for your character in order to compete and carry out objectives. But the game itself is utterly pointless and boring after a just a few playings online. But I'm getting ahead of myself'

Now, before going on a ranting, hate-filled diatribe, I should mention some of the highlights of this game. Anyone familiar with FPS controls will quickly become used to Purge's easy to use setup and key mappings. The 8 different characters look to actually be fairly well balanced, and could allow some excellent team strategies, if coordinated correctly. One big perk was the fact that the 56k modem connection to the Internet, while slow, is still exceptionally playable. I was able to join Internet games with ease and was ready to compete quickly. There also appears to be a small, but devoted group of Internet players who are willing to help the less initiated. They pretty much have to'little is available in the way of documentation, either in the small, 1-page foldout packed in the box or the few coherent web pages I was able to find. Steady'

That being said, Purge is easily the worst game I've had the displeasure of reviewing. Let's start at the beginning. The installer was buggy and crashed my machine twice while trying to install (on two different machines, I might add, XP and Win 2k). After the install was finally successful and patched (an 8.1 MB download), I was rewarded with a hideously colored screen and very little audio, simply the sound of my mouse selecting items. It went downhill from there.

Those of you looking for some single-player experience before jumping into the online world: Forget it. Purge is multiplay only, whether through a LAN or the Internet. You can of course set up your own dedicated server with ease, but I had very poor response and frame rate when trying to play a game on my own dedicated server/stand alone box. Graphics are a mixed bag: There seems to be some excellent detail in both certain skins and levels, but many of the characters are poor caricatures at best, embarassingly cartoonish drawings at worst. Color schemes in the game are garish bordering on obscene, I expect better out of professional level designers. Audio was also very poor. Without even a hint of ambience with music, sounds were limited to the sound of weapons fire, monosyllabic grunting and the occasional death sound.

Now we get to the meat of it: The only variation of the game is a modified Capture the Flag, as in, 'destroy the other team's portal.'? That's it, people. Please exit to the rear of the bus' No other purpose exists in the world of Purge. Even with the intriguing idea of levelling through combat and successful missions, the fact that Purge limits its scope to wiping out the enemy portal really limits replay value.

Oh, and let's not forget the bugs. Often times, my character would just stop moving for no reason. No lag, not on the edge of a border, not even stuck between random polygons (though that happened quite often)' just a complete lack of movement. I was kicked off servers with alarming regularity, sometimes in mid conversation with the game's admin. In fact, in the thirty or so times I've played Purge for this review, approximately 2/3 of my program closing were for crashes, even after the latest patch.

I could go on and on, but rather than make this any more mean or spiteful, I'll say this: You will be gravely disappointed if you drop some well earned cash for Purge. Good for a few fleeting moments of mayhem and little else, Purge was a disappointment to the extreme. Not Recommended at all.