Warsow is a free fps built on the Quake 2 engine. It combines aspects from games such as Quakeworld, Quake3 CPMA, Jet Set Radio, and Speedball. The game gives you the freedom to jump off walls, dash, dodge and slide to avoid being fragged. Using a mix of cell shaded and realistic textures, Warsow is certainly one of the more unique games I have seen. Although still in the early stages of development, it feels like a finished game. I also got a short interview with niplar, the lead tester of the Warsow team, to answer some general questions about the game and where it is headed. Although the game is officially called War§ow, I'll refer to it as Warsow.

Gameplay

Gameplay is fast and furious, combining several different styles of play into a single game. Quake fans will feel right at home, since the movement is based off of CPMA. The weapons are also similar to Quake, consisting of guns such as the shotgun and the rocket launcher. The game has a power up system for the guns, allowing strong or weak ammo to be used for each weapon. The amount of strong ammo you have is above the weapon icon, while weak ammo is below on the HUD. The strong ammo does more damage or has a bigger attack radius, or both. For instance the shotgun strong ammo provides a much larger spread than the weak ammo. The Electrobolt 's strong ammo turns it into a railgun like weapon, with a very high damage shot that is usually enough to kill in one shot.

The game's purpose is to be played competitively, and is one of the few games designed from the ground up to be played in leagues. It comes with game modes such as deathmatch, team deathmatch, and duel. There are new modes such as midair, where you attempt to kill each other before the ground does.

Graphics

Running off qfusion, a modified Quake 2 engine, means the game runs very well on old hardware. But that also means it doesn't have advanced features that newer engines have. The textures do look dated, but are not entirely ugly either. The graphics are nothing to marvel about, but keep the tone of a competitive focused game. They are simple and clean, with bright player models and interesting weapon designs.

Sound

Sounds are my major gripe of this otherwise brilliant game. Similar to Counter-Strike you can bind keys to say messages, however those messages are just plain annoying. Some of them sound like the voices of little children, however I find they are rarely used online. Otherwise the sounds mimic the graphics, simple and clean.

Warsow 0.2

Since Warsow is still in its early development, it is constantly being improved in various ways. Version 0.2 is coming in a few months and it promises better balanced weapons and an improved netcode. According to the developer's blog, the enhancements to the netcode worked out so well that they had to rethink weapon damage since people were hitting shots with ease now.

Miscellaneous

• In the current state the game doesn't have an installer, simply download, unzip, and run the exe.
• The ingame browser doesn't do a very good job at finding servers for some reason, so I used kquery. Kquery finds hundreds of servers while the ingame browser finds dozens.
• HLSW has also recently added support for Warsow servers
• CAL picked up 1v1 Warsow, for NA and European players