All Game Previews

by jkdmedia, May 15, 2004

Hellforces, published by Buka Entertainment and developed by Orion, puts players in the shoes of a man battling against the forces of hell in order to find a missing friend and save the earth from a satanic cult.  The game features an already impressive graphics engine and will have a variety of widely different levels and enemies.

The E3 demo featured four different areas: a town district overrun by zombies, a smuggler’s base within some ancient temple ruins, ancient catacombs and a military base crawling with special forces operatives.

While the AI hasn’t been tweaked yet and the playable build was little more than a tech demo, I was able to get a pretty good feel for the game.  Hellforces will feature 24 different weapon types, divided into classes much like in Half-Life and a lot of equipment like night vision goggles, binoculars and motion sensors.  The physics engine worked pretty nicely, as boxes didn’t simply explode when shot, but rolled around the room and knocked into other objects.  Bullets also ricocheted off of walls and would even bounce back and injure the player.

The graphics are still away from completion, but looked very impressive in early stages.  The character models had about 7,000 polygons each, with 300,000 of them rendered onscreen at a time.  The environments featured a good use of pixel shading, lighting and shadow effects, and bump-mapping, and realistic lighting effects.

Hellforces releases early next year.

For All E3 2004 Previews