Red Eclipse 1.5

Another huge FPS release that happened a short while ago was Red Eclipse 1.5.
This version is the result of almost two years of work and contains improvement on all fronts. Polish and balance has greatly increased all around, loads of new maps have been added, new models, textures and sounds have been included and a bunch of new "vanity-items" are here to play around with. For those gaming on their own AI can now be given orders and little details like hearing other players approach by listening to their footsteps complements gameplay while making the game feel much more complete.

Maps take place both inside and outside, with a great variety of locations to fight in.

Red Eclipse has a big focus on Parkour-like movement, differentiating itself from many other similar games but making players really mobile and agile. Aside from running and jumping, players can double-jump, dash through the air, run along walls and slide along the ground. This makes for a very unique type of gameplay where the surroundings become much more important. It's also very exciting, as players can appear from the most unexpected places. Best of all is that this allows for action-movie stunts like jumping off from a cliff, bouncing from one wall to the other, running along it with a sword in hand and then jumping down behind an unsuspecting player going for the kill...

Beam swords looking awesome. This is how you duel in Red Eclipse.

Another cool feature of Red Eclipse is the vanity items mentioned above. These allow you to customize your character in great detail. While most games of this type only allows for a choice of models and colors, here you can actually dress up your character using hats, wings, crowns, guitars, boots, masks and all sorts of other interesting items. Makes players more personal as well as being fun to play around with. More games should have this feature.

Explosions lighting up the environment and gets reflected in the water. Red Eclipse looks good!

A huge variety of game modes and mutators are available. Some are quite unique and fit the agile gameplay especially well, like the Race-mode where players have to use all types of skilled movement to get through danger-filled maps full of traps and challenges. It's very hard, but fun. It's also possible to play co-op, where players fight against hordes of bots. Always a plus for me, as I prefer co-op over competitive gaming for the most part.

Think you can get past this gap?

Red Eclipse is a very well done arena shooter with lots of extras setting it apart from other in it's genre. It also runs very well and looks really good even on low-powered hardware. If you have been interested before, now is the time to try. This release is simply awesome!