 Lucifer,
the Morning Star, the chief angel got a notion one day that not only
is he prettier than all the other angels, he also deserves to take
God's place on the throne. Using his considerable persuasive
powers he convinces 1/3 of the angels of heaven that this is a good
idea. Angels start grabbing up weapons and before you know it
you have a war of truly cosmic proportions.
This is where
"The War in Heaven" begins. It's moments after the
line's been drawn in the sand and you must choose if you're going to
be a good angel and fight against the rebellion or be a bad angel
and choose to fight on Lucifer's side. Each choice has its
benefits and consequences. Choose the bad guys and you get
lots of power and health early on but later you're going to run into
problems that all this indulgence won't easily solve. Choose
the good guys and you'll have to work with more restrictions but the
Almighty is on your side so ultimate victory is assured.
"The War
in Heaven" is from the makers of Rebel Moon, a PC First Person
Shooter by Fenris Wulf. Theodore Beale
spun off a Christian oriented company called "Eternal
Warriors" which produced this Christian first
person shooter based on warring angels in the last days. This
game is their first effort and others are planned.
It's a typical first
person action
shooter with levels full of enemies which must be dealt with while
you solve a task or puzzle. What sets this game apart from its
secular counterparts is the attempt to include a biblically based
lesson with each level. Even though some might wonder why the
makers of "The War in Heaven" lets players choose the
devil's side, this is done to facilitate lessons on the consequences
of rebellion and the desire for quick and easy power. As the
people at "Eternal Warriors" put it, "It [evil] has
its attractions, but ultimately leads to destruction...its honors
will not follow it past death."
When you click on the
Play button you are given a short lecture written to sound like a
passage out of the Bible. This serves as an introduction
to the level and is done as the level loads (nice touch since it
eliminates staring at the progress bar).
Each good guy level
has a biblical lesson associated with it (such as obedience and
faith) which usually requires you to do something to complete the
level. It might be to avoid taking a nifty looking but evil
weapon or to restrict your use of weapons in obedience to the
Lord. This offered some interesting twists to game play. There are
also some puzzles to solve, such as destroying an object to get a
door to open.
The bad guy levels
let you get straight to fighting and the introductory lectures are
focused around how upset the devil is over the unfairness of his
situation and how everyone should get to do whatever they want. There's a hitch to all this self indulgence and as the
levels progress you find that working for the devil might not turn
out quite the way you expected it would. Ahh, the peskiness of
sin. It seems to backfire on you every time.
For both
"paths" you start out with a relatively easy level,
followed by harder and more complex and challenging
levels. A new enemy is introduced with each level that is
stronger, tougher and behaves a little differently.
There's a good
variety of foes though the AI tends to be rather drab. Enemies
get stuck at doorways or attack the same way every time.
It looks like enemies try to dodge attacks but this appears more due to random
movements rather than reacting to the player. Even so there
were no fatal flaws and the AI did provide some
challenges. However, once you figured out their patterns
it was relatively easy to defeat them.
You also move at what
seems to be a constant fast walk. Even after getting the Boots
I was unsure that I moved any faster. One minor oddity, even though you're an angel you can't fly.
Clearly this was a design decision based on the limitations of the
game engine. Disallowing flight simplifies level design and
eliminates some other nasty programming problems. Even so, I
kept wanting to use those little wings on my character to fly
away. Sigh.
Speaking of
limitations, the game engine doesn't equal the state of the art in
today's first person shooters. It also appears to be somewhat
unpolished, almost as if it had been released unfinished. When
you pass through doorways, the world often "blinks out" or you'll
suddenly see what's underneath the floor. This can be most
disconcerting. While I found no game-killer bugs, don't stand
too close to a doorway when using your sling or the stones will
disappear into oblivion. Their website has a new patch which
improves game speed. They plan to have other patches as well
and will likely fix some of the engine's problems. While the
game is fully playable as is, you'll want to download the latest
patch.
Compared to other
games of its type "The War in Heaven's" engine appears to
be roughly equivalent from the user's perspective to the engine used
to create Duke Nukem 3D. It's
actually more sophisticated. but
I got the distinct impression that the engine could have been much
better given time. Perhaps the next offering from Eternal
Warriors will reflect this. Currently though, it doesn't compare
well to the Quake I engine and I won't even try to compare it to
Unreal Tournament or Quake III (considering their budget, comparing
it to QIII or UT wouldn't be completely appropriate anyway).
However, compared to
other engines, such as Might and Magic VI and VIII the engine fares
well enough.
Sound was adequate
and they come from the appropriate direction. That
is, if the creature was on the right of the screen the sound came through the
right speaker louder than the left. The box doesn't indicate
it supports positional sound such as A3D or Environmental Audio. However, this game doesn't really need
great 3D sound.
One slightly embarrassing
thing about the sound effects was the sound uttered when good "female"
angel was hit. Taken out of context it can
seem somewhat "suggestive." I didn't pick up on
this my first time through
and it was my wife that noticed it first, probably because she heard
the sound without seeing the accompanying action. This is one
of those unintentional things. Nothing else in the game
suggests otherwise. But it is a bothersome thing that some non-Christians will enjoy gloating about. It'd be nice if a
patch was issued to fix that particular sound just to avoid the
inevitable snickers from less than pure minds.
There are no options
for changing the game's resolution from within the game though you
can alter the resolution by changing the one of the "ini"
files (see below for some information on how to do this). Fortunately you can alter
the key bindings so that you can set your keyboard just the way you
want it. I immediately changed the movement keys. Your
mouse cursor is in the shape of a cross. I found a bit awkward
to click in the right spot.
This might have been just me but it was a minor irritant.
One major irritant
was the inability to save a game in the middle of a level.
Even though you can save the game at any point in a level, when you
reload that saved game you end up restarting the level anyway.
You must complete a level in one sitting. This can be very
annoying when you reach a jumping puzzle and die because you didn't
time the jump just right, especially if the jump happens to be at
the end of the level. Fortunately the game isn't overloaded
with jumping puzzles.
The game has no
"skirmish" mode and there's no multiplayer capabilities so
you can't just fight it out with a bunch of other angels controlled
by the computer or other people. Since this would have skipped
the biblical lessons and perhaps run counter to the goal of the
game, they may have consciously left this out though I'm guessing
they simply didn't have the time to add in these features. The
fact is that if they couldn't have put together a solid and fun
multiplayer/skirmish option, they were better off leaving it
out. Maybe a future game will offer some multiplayer gaming.
While the minimum
requirements are set at a Pentium 166, I can't recommend this game
to anyone with a system slower than a Pentium II. On a Pentium
II 350 with a Voodoo I card the frame rate ground down to under
5 fps in some places. While a Voodoo II card would have
improved frame rate significantly, based on the system requirements
I was still surprised by the low frame rate. There is a patch
which improves the speed of the engine. We've not tested it
but if you are having problems with frame rate, you'd do well to get
that patch.
On a Celeron 466
using a TNT2 card frame rate was never a problem. You can
improve frame rates significantly by turning off the video options
but I doubt this improvement would be significant enough to make
playing the game on a Pentium 166 enjoyable. If you are
considering buying this game and you only have a Pentium machine,
you should spend the time to download the demo. If the demo
runs fine then the entire game will run fine on your system.
The help file in the
directory you installed the game has some helpful tips on increasing
frame rate. By altering the "Preferences.ini" file
using notepad you can reduce the screen resolution which helps some
if your video card supports the lower resolutions. This is
also the only way to increase screen resolution (which significantly
improves the look of the game). It would have
been nice if a configuration program was included with the game to
help with altering these settings. Perhaps a utility program
will be created and put on the web site for downloading.
You can also alter
some other settings such as gravity, sound and the time scale. WARNING:
Make a backup of your Preferences.ini file before altering
the settings. Messing up can ruin game play or make it
impossible to run the game. With a backup you can always
restore the original settings if necessary. Increasing the
time by a small amount and decreasing gravity can significantly
alter the game play. In fact I settled in on a gravity of about half
the default setting and a time speed of 1.4 which greatly sped up
movement and combat.
One of the things I
enjoyed most about the game was the level design for the "good
guy" levels. While not overly detailed, they were usually
quite interesting and made good use of the engine's
capabilities. The "good guy" levels also seemed to
get the lion's share of the better textures. Unfortunately the
entire game suffers from average to poor quality textures and the
levels in Hell tended to be less interesting for my tastes.
Overall the game
accomplishes what it sets out to do which was to be a first person
action shooter based on biblical themes which teaches some biblical
lessons. It should have some appeal to non-Christian if they
aren't immediately turned off by the use of scripture or the
slightly preachy nature of the level introductions.
The game doesn't try
to be a theological polemic on what angelic warfare is all about.
In that regard it takes some artistic license, such as allowing for
fallen angels to be repentant and depicting angels as both male and
female. While I know of no biblical evidence for this there's
certainly no heresy here or anything to get up in arms about.
It simply tries to teach a few simple biblical lessons while
entertaining you with a decent game.
So should you go out
and buy the game? That depends. If you're looking for a
game that's on par with the current crop of first person shooters,
then you'll be disappointed in "The War in Heaven" but if
you want the state of the art in first person Christian games, this
one is head and shoulders above its competition (in the game engine
department). For a low
budget effort this is a reasonable attempt to do a fun Christian
game that also uses relatively current technology and game design to
present biblical lessons.
If you are
interested, there is a one
level demo available . It's worth downloading and trying
out if you are interested in the game. The game is available
in most retail stores or you can buy it online.
For those of you who
enjoy reading as well as playing video games, there is a companion
book based on The War in Heaven available on the developer's
website. We have not read it, but if you enjoy the game
storyline, you will probably want to check the book out as well.
Final
Score
Highlights: Some
good level design and at $19.99 it's half the price of other games
of its type.
Lowlights:
The engine is unpolished and has difficulty maintaining reasonable
frame rates on lower end machines with low end 3D cards.
Missing multiplayer option. Save games restart the level no
matter where in the level you saved.
Recommendation:
If the problems and limitations don't turn you off you should
consider it. Grab the download. You'll find out quickly
enough if this is a game you'll want to play.
Age Appropriateness:
Teens and older.
Christian
Sense (CS): 3
Game
Engine (GE): 3
Game
Play (GP): 3
Overall:
3 |
