Huxley Hands-On - Enforcer Deathmatch

E3 2009 is in full swing at the LA Convention Center, and one of the many highly anticipated games on display is Huxley: The Dystopia, which is being brought stateside by Ijji.com. We dived into a free-for-all deathmatch, one of several ways that you can play Huxley, as an "enforcer" class. Huxley has three different character classes: enforcers, which use heavy-duty close-range weapons and have various skills and abilities to help themselves get nice and cozy with their opponents; the phantom (effectively the "light" class), which is skilled with sniper rifles and has stealth abilities, such as the power to briefly turn invisible; and the avenger (effectively the "medium" class), which has access to a variety of different tactical abilities, such as special goggles that can detect invisible phantoms.

Our heavy was equipped with three different weapons and four different abilities. All character abilities in Huxley will be affixed to whichever items your character has equipped, so you can mix and match different skills with different items and choose in advance which ones to bring into battle. You can equip up to five different ability-slotted items to bring into battle, and as we've mentioned previously, some abilities can be activated whereas others will provide passive benefits. Our enforcer had four different abilities available: a helmet with defense against headshots (a passive ability), a speedy forward dash to help us get close, a temporary invulnerability skill, and a forward tackle that made our character lunge forward and instantly kill any enemy that we tagged with the skill. Our equipped weapons were a shotgunlike close-combat gun, a short-range grenade launcher, and a flamethrower (which seems like it's most useful against other pursuing enforcers). We were able to see the weapon and armor loadout on our pregenerated level 30 character in the game's inventory screen, which uses a paper-doll model for your character and inventory slots. Let's just say that your character can have a lot of stuff. We closed out of the inventory screen and dived into a match.

The level that we played was not unlike something you'd see in an Unreal Tournament game. The three-level map had a lot of verticality provided by open staircases that turned at 90-degree angles, which made ascending them dangerous. However, most of the map's items, such as ammo caches and health replenishers, were on the higher levels, whereas the damage enhancer--Huxley's answer to UT's damage amp (and Quake's quad damage)--sat right smack in the open area in the middle of the map. The deathmatch that we played seemed to run about as fast as an Unreal Tournament match (which is pretty fast, considering that UT is a purely arcade-style shooter), though our experience seemed just a bit slower, possibly because we were playing the ponderous enforcer class. It's also possible that we weren't as focused on shooting everyone else as we were on using our abilities. Though we managed to sandwich our opponents between our shoulder and a wall with a few lucky tackle kills, for the most part, we didn't have much success with our abilities, though that's probably because they were mapped to awkward keyboard keys like Z and C. With a bit more practice, we'd probably have done better, or at least that's what we'd like to think.

Huxley seems to have come a long way since its last North American press appearance in 2006 and seems much closer to a full-fledged, playable game, though we still have yet to play some of the larger team-based modes. At any rate, the game is finally going to be released in North America later this year as a download that's free to play and funded by microtransactions. It should be noted that Ijji.com is bringing over only the PC version of Huxley; the Xbox 360 version's development is being handled by the game's original developer, Webzen, whose plans for the Xbox 360 version are unclear at this point.