Developer: Meridian4
Publisher: Frozenbyte
Genre: Third Person Shooter
Price: $24.95

Minimum System Requirements
1.3 GHZ or Equivalent CPU
384 MB RAM,
GeForce 4 Ti 4200 or ATi Radeon 9000 or better video card

Recommended System Requirements
2.0 GHz CPU
512 MB RAM
GeForce FX 5900 Ultra or ATi Radeon 9500 Pro or better video card

Test System
Gateway MX6421 Notebook
AMD Turion 64 Mobile 1.8 GHz
448MB RAM
ATi Radeon Mobility X300 64MB


When I started Shadowgrounds, I was impressed with the graphics and lighting. After that, the game went downhill. The bad voice-overs and the unoriginal gameplay left me forgetting I was playing a new game. The concept follows a basic scenario, humanity terraforms a moon and sends people to work and live there. Hostile aliens take over facility and kill everyone. An unsuspecting hero saves the day, thanks to clues left on computers and PDA’s, and the help of invincible survivors who never run out of ammo.

Gameplay

The game started with a demoted security officer equipped with a flashlight and an unlimited ammo handgun. The power goes out and everyone starts dying. The game is played in a top down format. Using the mouse to aim and the keyboard to move, I find myself constantly being stuck on bushes, corners of desks, and the mysterious invisible object. The introduction of a rechargeable flashlight is unique. Think of the camping flashlight you shake to recharge. It is great for scaring the smaller aliens, but when it comes to the bigger baddies, it just lets you see them coming. The game relies on B-horror movies’ scare technique and aliens jump out at you with a quick banging noise out of the darkness. This quickly turns monotonous..

I am not saying that this is not a fun game; for the die hard top-down shooter fans it doesn’t disappoint. The game sports a good upgrade system for weapons, but nothing awe-inspiring. I went around and found bigger and better weapons, each with three potential upgrades. I found myself running out of the good ammo fast, and trying to finish the aliens off with my hand gun, which (as always) is something you tend to forget with in the “bigger and better” kind of scenario. I recommend that you upgrade your handgun! Finding upgrade parts for your gun is a new idea to enhance your weapons. Instead of hunting all over for new weapons and the upgrade parts, just kill enough aliens, and they will give you the parts. It takes certain amount of parts to do an upgrade. My big question was “what was an alien doing with weapon upgrade part?” Also since, when you kill a monster he is gone, you only get so many parts. I did find a couple places were aliens did re-spawn due to a glitch that allowed me to get an unlimited amount of gun parts. But after awhile I got bored and moved on.


Multiplayer

The good news is that you can play this game cooperatively. The bad news is that you can only do this on the same PC.

Graphics / Sound

The problem that left me wanting to throw my mouse was the beautiful graphics and lighting. If you place the game on all the highest settings, you find yourself waiting around for long load times and skipping music. The voice-overs do not even come close to matching the lips of the characters. So to get smooth game play and some what to make the character not speak like he was in a bad martial arts movie, I had to dummy down the graphics settings.