Unbelievably cool!
Apparently, there is some pishposh, "end of the world+two factions=power struggle" story line, but you don't really need to understand it to enjoy the Unreal Tournament/Quake meets Star Wars gameplay. That's right. Star Wars. If you have ever said to yourself "I want to do that" while watching the movies after one of the jedi order has flung his hand before him and caused the surrounding debris to blast away, then this is your game.
You can do that. The two maps available (yes only two. the other three are currently unavailable to anyone but ppu users. But as I said people are working on it. Hi, uauuau!) are spacious and have heaps of industrial and construction supplies, all waiting for you to manipulate, either by creating massive orbs of destruction or by force pushing. One of the coolest things to do is pick up an explosive barrel and slam it into one such supply stack and watch (jaw dropped) the amazing explosion and subsequent rain of debris as the physics engine kicks in and rends box sides from one another and so on.)
Patrolling the maps themselves are three types of characters, The Guardian (read: I, Robot robot, whose SpiderMan-esque leaps into the air while raining hot lead down upon the unlucky below him are nothing short of awe-inspiring), The Bishop (read: Crazy Psi lady/Darth Vader on crack, whose ability to snatch up the opposition and force-squish them into meat chunks and blood spray is...pulpalicious) and the BlackOps (read: run of the mill special ops guy who has minor psi abilities, but can operate the vehicles scattered around the maps). By far my favorite is the Guardian. Wow, just, wow.
The weopons are your average deathmatch arsenal: machine gun/underbarrel 'nade launcher, rocket launcher, sniper rifle, and a pistol (which suprisingly is the best gun in the game-- deadly accurate and cool looking.)
Game modes are also common fair: Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, Assault (drop a bomb in the enemy base) and CTF. It is significantly cooler here, though, as the AI is challenging and the physics aspect is essentially another dimension in the game.
The graphics are aging. They remind me a bit of toned down Quake 4 graphics, which is based on the Doom 3 engine, which was released, what? 3-4 years ago? Not bad though, especially if you enable motion blur (system hog) and high Dynamic Range lighting. (HDR)
Performance-wise, the game is really a resource quagmire. Without one of the non-ppu mods I mentioned, this game is pretty much unplayable. I got 25 fps on my dual core 2.66, x1950pro, and 1 gig of ram rig. It was supisingly smooth, though, and the human eye registers at 24fps, so I was happy. Supposedly a patch for the game will be released soon, and may have multithreaded support, along with high resolution textures.
As this game is free, I can't imagine anyone not trying it out if they have the system resources.