ECTS 2002Bandits: Phoenix Rising hands-on

GRIN, the developer of the space-age racing game Ballistics, was in attendance at this year's ECTS conference in London. The developer was showing off its upcoming vehicular combat game Bandits: Phoenix Rising, a simple, arcade-style car-combat game that will support the Matrox Parhelia graphics card's triple-monitor display capabilities. In other words, Bandits can be played with three monitors lined up next to each other, as we did at ECTS.

The game itself seems simple and fast-paced, in the interest of being accessible. Bandits features three different vehicles: a light, medium, and heavy vehicle--the light vehicle is the fastest but is the most poorly armed, while the heavy is the most heavily armed but is also the slowest. All three vehicles start the game with a moderately powerful machine-gun weapon that has unlimited ammo--the game itself was running on a fairly high-end computer system with a Parhelia card and handled muzzle flares and ejecting brass shells from the machine gun along with animated dust clouds from our vehicle with ease. Despite the fact that the game doesn't seem to have animated shadows on the player vehicle when passing under bridges and shaded areas, it moves at an extremely high frame rate and has plenty of visual bells and whistles otherwise.

The game has an extremely simple control scheme, though it took us a little while to get used to it. In the default control setup, the W and S keys are used to accelerate forward and go in reverse, respectively, while the mouse is used to steer as well as to aim. However, pressing shift makes the A and D keys available to steer right and left and also lets you aim with the mouse while moving in a different direction. The game's control itself seems a bit slippery, but to its credit, Bandits is extremely fast-paced. It actually seems to be a worthwhile tactic to "dogfight" against larger, slower vehicles by quickly weaving in and out and driving past them while shooting at them. The game will have 22 single-player missions, plus nine multiplayer maps for up to eight players at once in deathmatch and team deathmatch games. Though GRIN won't be including any sort of editing tools with the retail release of the game, the developer is attempting to keep the game "mod-friendly," so that enterprising players with some spare time on their hands will be able to create their own custom maps and missions with relative ease. Bandits is currently scheduled for release later this year.