![]() ![]() Competitive players absolutely loved how it made movement and awareness the key skills in the game, but casual players - and most reviewers - didn't embrace it as readily." The "one gun" design was probably the most divisive factor in the game. "The one "do it all" gun that combined long and close range firing modes, a grenade launcher, and a melee attack into one weapon was a way of limiting the scope of the design, while staying true to the game's environment. "As we were a small team, we had to be careful not to over-design the game or pack it full of features," says Gallagher. With no AI bots to help train the curious, no vehicles or classes to provide any meaningful sense of progression, and just a single weapon to master, it would have felt to some like the game's apparent complexity was a deliberate ploy to mask a black hole where various game modes, levels, weapons and other assorted content should have been instead. It took more than a few hours to get used to just one orientation, let alone master the lot. ![]() The initial release featured just four maps, all of which had the potential to disorientate the player on account of the six degrees of freedom involved, and the need to anchor to a surface in order to sustain any kind of accuracy. Yet without the resources to develop its ideas sufficiently for the solo player component, and with the success of Left 4 Dead and Team Fortress 2 suggesting such efforts might even be unnecessary, it was decided that "a skill-driven, multiplayer FPS was the right way to go."ĭespite its evolved control mechanics that cleverly combined modern FPS sensibilities with the inertia-based movement of the space-combat sim, and with many a tense online gunfight set around and within crumbling asteroids, meteor-pitted satellites and deserted mining outposts, Shattered Horizon was as thin a game as the atmosphere it simulated. We felt that complete freedom of movement in zero-gravity, and fully three dimensional level design, had huge potential to provide new experiences not found in other FPS games." Shattered Horizon's zero-gravity mechanics are refreshing but an acquired taste. "I'm not sure how many game ideas were discussed and debated, but I do know that the concept of a space-based shooter was the one that everyone got excited about. "Futuremark was, and still is, a small company," says marketing manager James Gallagher, suggesting that creating the amount of content expected of a mainstream shooter - story-driven content especially - was far beyond its means. ![]() In aiming for the stars, Shattered Horizon was almost doomed to wander gaming's outer reaches from the moment it was conceived. As it turns out, however, it's problems were by an order of magnitude more fundamental than just a lack of content. The outer space-based shooter from Futuremark - its debut game after more than a decade of making benchmarking software - didn't exactly receive the most effusive of praise upon its release in 2009, earning a 6/10 from Eurogamer's then-space junkie Jim Rossignol in a review that was entirely well-reasoned and fair.įor all the good stuff that the game provided - a detailed and compelling backstory, a innovative UI and controls, and brilliantly realised zero-g environments that rewarded the spatially aware - a notable lack of content was high up the list of criticisms. In the case of Shattered Horizon, however, we can be forgiven for our lack of appreciation. Hence the annual updates masquerading as franchise sequels, while the more daring and interesting shooters are overlooked and promptly forgotten about. Year after year we collectively moan about the lack of innovation in first-person shooters, and then, when a game does come along that dares to be different, we shoot holes in it for not being more like those we purport to hate, but actually can't get enough of. We're going to have to change our ways at some point. ![]()
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