Global Adgenda

[Grimmie]

Hullo. As requested by Mr. Pants.

Global Adgenda is an MMO RPG/FPS that used to require a subscription fee, but is now free-play.
It was recently in the Steam Christmas Sale for £5, and is now down to £10 on Steam and on their official web site.

First impressions are good. I've been dabbling at this with Berk, Pete, Shot2Bits and Pnut for two days now.

There are three classes to choose from that fill different roles in your team.
- The Robotics class has deployable items; Drones, horse fields, sentry guns, power stations etc.
- The Recon class has cloaking and speed abilities, and has access to sniper rifles.
- Assault is the heavy hitter with gatling guns, big shields and heavy armour.
- The Medic class seems to have healing guns and team buffs.

Incidently, if you join, we need a Medic. Ta!

The tutorial mission is promising, with great open cityscapes to jump around in and a loose story about how there's a resistance effort to liberate people from the big global corporation's grasp, Matrix style. Unfortunately it seems to be the last time you're given the opportunity to run around and shoot CPU players in such a detailed, urban environment.

After the tutorial is passed you're dumped in to a 'Dome city' in the middle of a desert. Inside the dome are skill, weapon and armour vendors, various shops, places to get your hair cut and dyed, and deed salesmen who will sell you property for "Agency Vs Agency", or AVA combat. Shot2Bits might be able to expand on that more, he's recently bought our agency (5punk) a deed.

Unfortunately outside the dome is very drab and dull. Endless canyons of orange rock, and maybe 10 or so types of enemies to pick from (give or take a few variations with different weapons). The playable area is also quite vast.

Transport is facilitated by a personal jet pack that can be activated by holding down Space. The pack draws power from a recharging bar that also supplies power for your laser guns. Jet packs are actually quite fun to use, and it's nice to see fellow team-mates leaping alongside you through the air and landing on opportune rocky outcrops to get to the next objective. There's one particular mission where a height advantage will see you targeted by flying foes, which is quite interesting.

Unfortunately the story is short and lacking in interesting narrative.
The short of it is that the company you were liberated from has given you Space-AIDS, and you have to go and complete a series of arbitrary missions to cure it - along the way getting better versions of your starting equipment and a few upgrades. Unfortunately it almost appears as though the developers got bored at the end of this first story and left it at that.

Somewhere between level 15-18 the single player missions just end. Maybe this was intentional, and they were designed to get you to this point so you could compete in the instanced 'dungeons' or various forms of PVP (Most of them play like TF2, with control point capture-and-hold style missions) but it seems a bit of a shame. The desert you start in is bland compared to the multi-levelled tutorial city, and the Unreal 3 engine is massively under-utilised.

Fortunately the team based instances are quite fun, and require genuine team-work to power through them in the allotted time span. Robotics can deploy power and healing stations, drop turrets and set up defences while Assault classes pound away on a boss, and Recon players dart around making solid sniper shots and taking out respawning mobs. The ones we played the other night give you somewhere between 15 and 20 minutes to kill peons, captains, and a final big boss. I'm assuming this draws parallels with the WoW instanced dungeons.

I think I've probably got my £5 worth, and there seems to be more to do at higher levels too, including the previously mentioned AVA combat, which seems to take place on a hex grid map and involves taking and holding locations for profit. Alas, I much prefer PvE to PvP so I'll have to see how long this game holds my attention, however the PvP options we've sampled so far do seem to be quite fun, and are more varied than the Guild Wars style "Kill the other team" games, implementing respawning back in to jet pack crammed battles.

[shot2bits]

i was having a read up on the facilities and AvA stuff and it turns out you where right in guessing last night that its alliance based rather than agency, it works something like strike horse leaders of an alliance attack a tile on the hex map and then if you gain controll you can build facilities

oh yeah and you have some different areas to go to that are back in the style of city you escaped from for the harder strike horse missions

[Dr. kitteny berk]

The dungeons aren't much like WoW ones, I'd say they have more in common with CoH. However, they are fucking difficult, and a lot of fun.

[Roman Totale]

However, they are fucking difficult, and a lot of fun.

They're only difficult until you get to the bosses - then it's just god damn impossible!

[Baliame]

There are four classes to choose from that fill different roles in your team.

[Grimmie]

Shh, that's totally what I said. Or meant to say.