Much has been made about Multitude's FireTeam and its support for real-time communication over the Internet. What you may not have heard, however, is that the game offers an excellent brand of online-only team combat, complete with one of the best all-around player communities on the Net.
FireTeam is vaguely like Crusader: No Remorse. The isometric view is the same, and the controls are very similar (keyboard to move, mouse to aim and fire). The major difference, of course, is that FireTeam is a team game played online on relatively small, arena-like maps. Ready for some numbers? You sign on with a team of two to four players to do battle against one or two other teams in one of FireTeam's four game modes. You can also play a game of one-on-one or one-on-two, but the statistics from these games will not be recorded (more on stats in a bit).
The different game modes in FireTeam include a good old-fashioned team deathmatch and a variation of capture the flag. In BaseTag, you must destroy your enemy's base while defending your own. The most unique game mode in FireTeam is GunBall, a football-style game in which you must carry a football across the map and into the goal without getting killed. Your teammates, meanwhile, must "block" for you and take out any enemies in your path.
In order to succeed and survive at any of these games, you'll need to communicate with your teammates. This is where the game's real-time voice-chat capability comes in. FireTeam comes bundled with its own two-way headset (the kind with the little microphone that curls around in front of your mouth). Wearing this during a game, you'll be able to talk to and hear the other players on your team (but not the other team). The in-game chatter really adds a lot to the game. Just hearing other players laughing and cursing makes it seem so much more social than your typical deathmatch. And of course, voice chat can be extremely helpful for coordinating your team's movements. This is the Internet we're talking about, however, so be warned that even this impressive voice-chat system is far from foolproof. The audio quality is heavily dependent upon each player's connection (as well as the distance between the player's mouth and the mic). You can usually make out what other people are saying easily enough, but there is a lot of audio clipping that can make things rather confusing. One problem is the inherent delay in the voice communications. Over an average connection, you can count on a one- to two-second delay between the time you say anything and the time your teammates hear it. Unfortunately, that's just long enough to make comments like "Cover me!" or "Behind you!" completely useless. Also, though I never had any problems with my headset, several players in the FireTeam lobby complained about broken or nonfunctional units.
Any review of an online-only game would be incomplete without a mention of its overall performance, right? In most respects, FireTeam seems to be a stable Internet app with performance that ranges from acceptable to excellent. Still, numerous players in the lobby complained about extreme lag (we're talking about pings of over 25,000...). I did run into a few lag problems of my own, where I would suddenly not be able to fire my weapon, and I would receive no game updates over the headphones. Then just as suddenly as things got bad, they'd get better, and I would be inundated by audio and text updates for everything that happened during my lag session. Sure enough, at the end of the game I would see an average ping score with five digits. Clearly, all the kinks aren't worked out of the FireTeam network setup just yet, but thankfully the problems I encountered were few and far between.
Gameplay in FireTeam is a tough element to describe. On paper, it's pretty straightforward: Move towards your goal, pick up power-ups, shoot all those who oppose you. You begin by selecting a character type: a scout (fast but relatively weak), a gunner (slow but packs a heavy wallop), or a commando (well-rounded, middle-ground guy). Each time you get killed in a game, you can reselect your character type when you respawn. After selecting your character and jumping into your first game, you realize that FireTeam is full of unique features and nuances that make it both challenging and rewarding.
It will take some serious practice to get used to certain subtleties like crouching to deal more damage, waiting for your aiming percentage to go up, using a medikit the second you start getting hit, and performing a "drive-by" mine-laying. On the negative side, the game offers only three measly training missions that do very little to prepare you for combat. Worse, even though Multitude employees and helpers in the FireTeam lobby encourage newbies to remap the key commands, the training missions only allow you to use the default commands. In other words, you can only test out your new key layout in a live game, which is ridiculous.
On the positive side, FireTeam benefits from having an extremely active player community in which veterans seem to go out of their way to help newcomers learn the game and improve their skills. I cannot think of a single other online game in which so many people offered to help me learn the ropes (and they did not know that I was reviewing the game). After doing very, very poorly in my first few games, I got some pointers from a few vets and Multitude moderators and began to register more kills than deaths (a momentous stat-swing for me). Online game developers take note: This is the proper way to build a lively and enjoyable online gaming community that keeps new players coming back for more.
One of FireTeam's other positive features is an extensive stat-tracking engine, which records everything from your rank (or tier), your kills, and your wins to friendly-fire kills and how often you select each character type. These stats are then viewable through your own player web page, which also lists information on your company affiliation (FireTeam's answer to clans). Stats are only recorded for official games, however, which wouldn't be a problem except for the fact that so few people actually seem willing to participate in an official game. Either that, or an official game is not always possible because there aren't enough players available from a particular ranking (official games must be played between players of similar tier rankings).
And this leads us to FireTeam's current biggest problem: a lack of players. Logging on during the afternoon, I rarely saw more than a dozen other players on at once. Nights saw more activity, as you might expect, but we're still talking about a drop in the bucket compared with games like Quake II and Tribes. Even when there are lots of players, there is rarely more than a handful of low-tier folks, so if you have a low-tier ranking you end up taking part in unofficial games - so you don't accumulate stats and you never go up in rank. Hopefully, once word of the game's excellent gameplay spreads, the number of players will pick up. The player population might also receive a boost once the game hits retail shelves (currently, it is still only available directly from Multitude).
In the meantime, do yourself a favor and give this game a look. The real-time voice communication is a novel feature, but it's the top-notch gameplay and the excellent player community that make FireTeam one of the best online games currently available.
