Artificial Intelligence
Pretty much every first person shooter you can play nowadays comes with some sort form of computerized opposition. In Counter-Strike 1.6, the third party podbots you could play against were rather primitive attempts at AI, as they would basically just run around like chickens with their heads cut off (and wall hack… cheaters). In single player games like Half-Life 2, you have combine soldiers who throw and excessive amount of grenades and actually move and shoot as if they were trying to kill you (though they rarely do because you’re Gordon Freeman a.k.a God Scientist). Although AI in games is progressively getting much better, you usually find yourself up against outclassed and under-performing competition. Not so in CellFactor: Revolution.

CellFactor uses something called the Kynapse AI system from a company called Kynogon to power its “bots”. The quotations in the previous sentence are only there because it is somewhat unfair to call the AI controlled opposition in CellFactor: Revolution bots. Rather, they are more like full-fledged, highly capable enemies that do their best to kill you before you kill them. Like most advanced bots, the Kynapse bots in CellFactor do things like evade attacks, fire at you with somewhat poor accuracy, and seem to be cheating at times. However, what really separates the Kynapse bots from any other AI you will see in any game is that they are able to use ALL of the abilities of their character, and use them appropriately. I cannot tell you how many times I was crushed to death by a Bishop character seemingly out of nowhere and could do nothing about it. I ran into plenty of Guardian characters as a Black Op only to get completely trampled. I was sniped across the map plenty of times as well. For this reason, CellFactor revolution is one of the very few death match style games that can be played with any sort of significance without an Internet connection. Selecting 10 Kynapse bots of whatever variety you please on whichever level you prefer will result in a training session that, at the very worst, closely mimics the experience one would encounter if they were playing against 10 seasoned CellFactor-playing human beings.

Perhaps the only issue I see with the Kynapse bots is that they are so advanced that the AI calculations that need to be performed by the CPU result in some pretty significant slowdowns while playing the game. After speaking with the game developers, it is apparent that they would like to be able to offload these calculations to another core in order to speed things up a bit. I can only assume that efforts are being made to make this happen.

Multiplayer and Competitive Aspirations
As a writer for GotFrag, I find it difficult to play a new game without considering how readily adoptable it is for competitive play. This is an unfortunate trait (in the sense that it is a burden to have to consider a game in this way rather than simply enjoy it for what it is; a game) that, in the past couple of years, has taken a back seat to considering whether or not that particular game would be a good candidate for inclusion to GotFrag Hardware’s benchmarking suite. However, given the current state of affairs in competitive gaming – there seems to be the lack of a unified movement towards any one game in particular – it would make sense that every new first person shooter be looked over with a ‘fine-toothed comb’.

Game play video 1

Game play video 2

That said, CellFactor: Revolution possesses all of the basic necessities of a game that could be played competitively on a large scale. The game play and fighting modes are easily learned by anyone with previous first person shooter experience. For the most part, game play consists of your standard WASD movement controls and logically organized utility buttons for special abilities. CellFactor also has the online functionality that is an obvious must-have for a competitive game. Lastly, CellFactor: Revolution was clearly built around the multi-player experience, as little attention was devoted towards the story line in this version of the game. However, there are several glaring problems with CellFactor: Revolution that will prevent it from becoming a widely adopted competitive game – at least for now.

First and foremost are the hardware requirements for the game. Although nothing would make AGEIA, Immersion Games, Artificial Studios, and Timeline Interactive more happy than to see PhysX cards in every high-end gaming PC, the reality of the situation is that it will take more than just this one title to persuade serious gamers that a dedicated physics processing unit is a necessary addition to their computer. That said, there WILL be several killer titles launched in the next few months that will start to make the PhysX card a necessity as opposed to a luxury, and when this happens you will start to see the viability of physics-based games as competitive platforms increase dramatically. However, we are still a ways out from that happening, so for now, the hardware requirements of CellFactor: Revolution will probably keep this stunningly beautiful and feature-rich game from becoming widely adopted by the professional gaming community.

Game play video 3

Game play video 4

Secondly, the amount of weapons that are currently available in the game may present a problem, as players of many of the historically popular death match games have had much broader arsenals at their disposals. For instance, in Quake 4 there are nine weapons. In CellFactor, there are very few (actually there are none) weapons that can be used by all three characters in the game. While not necessarily a bad thing, a key feature to death match games is that all characters are created equal. The next part to this deficiency is that there are no “items” in CellFactor: Revolution. Whereas in a game like Quake 4 there are all types of items like armor shards, health packs, and ammunition strewn about on any given map, in CellFactor: Revolution there are no such items. While it is true that there are some special things that are hidden in the various maps such as psi power-ups, the ability of one character to stay alive and “control” a map is severely diminished because said player cannot use the time afforded between frags to gather health packs, armor, and ammunition.

Finally, as alluded to earlier, it would be tremendously difficult to have three unique characters with very different combat styles in a truly competitive gaming environment. While it is true that no single character in CellFactor: Revolution is more powerful than the next, the ability of certain characters to manipulate certain environments when other characters cannot creates an unfair playing field. In traditional death match games like Quake, Painkiller, and Warsow, every character is created equal and there are no special abilities that are unique to one character. This is not to take away from the death match capabilities of CellFactor: Revolution. There is no doubt in my mind that the game will be enormously fun to play with friends and the dynamic created by the three unique characters in any given map will be very interesting to observe no matter what your frame of thought. However, this is just another reason that CellFactor: Revolution is unlikely to be widely adopted by the professional gaming community until changes are made to the game that will better accommodate such an environment.