C.O.R.E Preview

by John Kershaw on October 6, 2008 at 9:44 am

Good first person shooters are a rare find on the DS. C.O.R.E promises “old school” action tied to a “Gripping sci-fi storyline, with a fully interactive world”. I got my hands on an early build of the game last week, so hit the jump to get my impressions.

The build I have been playing spans two of the eventual 15 levels of the game, so I can’t say too much about the story. The general gist of the situation is that a secret base, built over a crash site of something alien, has dropped out of contact. It’s your job to go in and find out what’s going on. You slowly find out more about what happened via text logs scattered throughout the levels. Nothing too original or ground breaking so far, but there is certainly room for a few interesting twists.

The seemingly de facto DS FPS controls, with the touch pad for looking, d-pad for movement and shoulder buttons for firing feel comfortable for the most part. In the build I was playing I was unable to move diagonally using the d-pad, which sounds like a minor complaint, but did cause movement to feel a touch clumsy at times.

Boom! Low-rez headshot!

Once you get used to it, you can move quite rapidly around the hallways of the underground base. The maps themselves are typically linear, and feel quite sparse in parts. I didn’t encounter any more than two enemies at the same time and there are very few items to pick up. There are just enough health and ammo stations to keep you alive, but you will find less ammo causally spread around than in your typical FPS.

Combat feels good with the stylus providing you with just enough accuracy to be usable. My only problem was when I was taking damage. There is no indication of the direction your enemy is in. This can make it hard to determine just where your target is. The enemies I encountered did have some nice variation and their character models seemed on par with the level of the rest of the game. That is to say, somewhere between Doom and Quake

Graphically I was impressed by what the team at NoWay Studio have accomplished. The game runs smoothly and has a nice level of detail to it, considering the hardware it’s running on. The music and sound effects are as you would expect. Repeating heavy guitar riffs make up the majority of the audio-scape, interspersed with the grunts of your foes, very reminiscent of Quake 1.
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The preview also came with Free For All, Team Arena and Capture The Flag multiplayer modes. The game will support both multi-card and single-card play and allows up to 4 players at once. Although I wasn’t able to play too much with the multiplayer, it really does feel like it could be a legitimate challenger to Mario Kart DS for the “we’re sat around and bored with our DS’” game of choice.

So things are looking good. It may not be ground breaking in its narrative accomplishments, or re-defining the hand-held FPS genera, but it is definitely bringing around all the right feelings. If you are a fan of the classic PC FPS’ and want that same feeling on the go, then I highly recommend keeping an eye on C.O.R.E.

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