ÜberSoldier Hands-On - Undead German Soldiers Fight On

We've seen many World War II shooters to date, but we haven't seen one that puts you in the shoes of an undead German officer out to get revenge on the evil scientists who turned him this way. That's perhaps the best way to briefly describe ÜberSoldier, an upcoming first-person shooter from CDV and Russia's Burut Software. With only a single-player campaign and no multiplayer to speak of, CDV is aiming to release ÜberSoldier for a budget-minded $30.

ÜberSoldier is a game that could very well remind you a bit of 2001's Return to Castle Wolfenstein. Both are first-person shooters that mix historical events (World War II) with fantastical elements. Return to Castle Wolfenstein featured Nazis toying around with the occult and the supernatural, and that resulted in an army of demons. In ÜberSoldier, the Nazis are playing around with genetics, and the result is an army of zombies that also happens to include your character. As the opening movie shows, you play a German officer who is killed in an enemy ambush. However, your body was turned over to a mad Nazi scientist to resurrect as part of the army of the dead. Instead of turning into a mindless zombie, though, you retain your memory and desire nothing but revenge. (It's too bad these Nazis didn't have movies like Robocop and Universal Soldier to teach them the dangers of resurrecting the dead and expecting them to obey.)

The game will consist of approximately 12 levels, which is about standard length for a first-person-shooter campaign. You start by waking up in a dank asylum that's sort of like the headquarters of the Nazi zombie army, and it won't be long before you're taking down guards and orderlies, picking up their weapons, and blasting a bunch of Nazis in revenge. If the zombie army didn't clue you in, this is very much an action-heavy first-person shooter, so don't expect any kind of realistic combat. It's mainly about who has the biggest gun, as well as the ammo to use it.

You'll get the standard array of weapons to play with, including a knife, which you can whip out for a quick, silent kill, pistols, rifles, sniper rifles, and machine guns. There's also a flamethrower, which feels like it's there to pay homage to Wolfenstein's flamethrower--just light the bad guys on fire and listen to their screams. There are also some interesting mental powers that you can draw upon. These powers are fueled by rage, and you accumulate rage by accomplishing special tasks, such as shooting three bad guys in the head. When you've accumulated enough rage, you can activate a power, such as a telekinetic shield that can temporarily deflect incoming bullets. If you do take damage, health packs abound whenever your health bar dips into dangerous territory.

ÜberSoldier has some fairly advanced technology built into it. The graphics engine itself looks fairly modern and up-to-date, and there are plenty of shader effects at work. Just look at a brick façade and you'll see that it's less like a texture and more like it's built of individual bricks. Character models are rendered in sharp detail, and there's always something grimly satisfying about blasting a jackbooted gestapo agent with a rifle. It's not all graphical prettiness, though, as there's also a fairly sophisticated physics system in the game. For instance, you can knock over tables and see all the objects on them tumble to the ground (which might make it a bit tough if you were supposed to recover one of those objects). And, one of the cooler things deals with the concussive effects of an explosion. If you're standing too close to an explosion, it will literally knock your character to the ground, and you'll have to get back up on your feet before you can fight again.

There won't be any multiplayer capability in ÜberSoldier, mainly because there wasn't enough time to create and test one properly. However, that's part of the reason that CDV plans on releasing the game with a lower price. The company feels that it has a solid single-player shooter with a modern graphics engine, and from what we've seen of ÜberSoldier, that looks to be exactly the case. ÜberSoldier is expected to ship this year.