My review of Xonotic: The Free and Fast Arena Shooter
The first detail I feel I should make clear is that I don't care for FPS games, especially the ones released nowadays. I'll occasionally go back to Doom 2 or maybe dip my toes in the original Quake, but you'd never see me going back to them again and again, with foam in the mouth at the sound of my PC turning on.
So color me surprised that once I first laid eyes upon Xonotic through the Zorin OS 8 Gaming edition, which featured a bunch of free open-source games, I was instantly drawn to its incredible fluidity, variety of excellent maps, and sheer level of production quality. I played that game for hours, ignoring everything else on the boot disc.
If you're a hardened FPS player, chances are you too might have given Quake a shot. After all, it was one of the first online multiplayer first person shooters ever, and was the first truly 3D FPS ever, if memory serves. Taking notes from that game, as well as Unreal Tournament, Xonotic Team manages to create a game that feels like playing both, but retains its own identity. The visual design is surprisingly consistent for an open-source project of its scale, given how many developers might have their own visions when creating a game. Designs of maps generally have a mix of the aesthetic of Quake 3, but more futuristic with modern-looking technology complimenting broken down bricks and pipes. It's a look that fits nicely, and coupled with the fact that this is one of the best looking games I've ever seen, that's especially impressive.
With impressive graphics on a PC, you might expect the required specs to be pretty hefty. Actually, even though you won't be able to run it on an ancient machine, Xonotic runs alright on modest hardware. Two gigabytes of memory should be enough, assuming you are okay with sacrificing some of the prettier looking effects like reflections or bloom (or especially bump mapping on textures). Frames rarely drop unless you happen to be in a map that wasn't well-optimized (I'm looking at you, Solarium), but besides that, Xonotic performs well. No issue here.
As for maps, there are certainly plenty of those, and they're nice and varied as I stated above. For being a free game, the quality of these maps (especially Stormkeep and Final Rage) are just phenomenal -- they are totally built around the fast, fluid motion of the player, and both have little opportunity to camp, which is excellent design I don't often take note of. My personal favorites are Stormkeep, Final Rage, and Dance (displayed left). However, if the standard maps don't tickle your fancy (or you just want more), there is a massive wealth of user-created maps ranging from bland but playable to really really good. There's a map of Peach's Castle from Super Mario 64, there's ports from the first three Quake games, and there are also many original maps. You can make maps in NetRadiant, but I haven't had any luck with it personally.
Weapons range from a shotgun that can be used as a bludgeon and feels sweet whenever it fires, to an energy sniper rifle, to a laser-guided rocket launcher, to a blaster that bounces you and your enemies away from it. The overwhelming majority of these guns have secondary fires, such as the Crylink (a plasma shotgun, basically) having a less powerful but more focused blast, or the Mortar (the grenade launcher) firing a grenade that bounces, waits a second, then explodes. Some are more mundane -- the blaster's alt-fire is just to switch to the last used weapon, and the shotgun's alt is a good thwack -- but they are undeniably useful, and add a great deal of depth to the weapons. There are many other weapons (more than 10, with the 'New Toys' mutator enabled), and in addition to the blaster for launching yourself in the air, the game has a hook similar to Link's hookshot from The Legend Of Zelda. Except, instead of firing it at a specific point and falling from there, you turn into a gun-wielding, electric Spider Man with a taste for the blood of your enemies. The grapple hook isn't available in every map, but in Instagib mode, it usually is. It's a blast to move around a map with. You can even hook onto other players, if you aim well enough.
Xonotic comes with a huge variety of game modes as well. Aside from the usual deathmatch, team deathmatch, and capture the flag, there is a Race mode to see how fast you can traverse a map, there's a Freeze Tag mode where death means that a teammate must touch you for a few seconds before getting back into the fray, there's Key Hunt where two random players on two teams are given a key, and one of the teams must acquire all the keys by asking nicely killing the guy with the key and taking it before another crony nabs it... Xonotic certainly isn't lacking in content, that's for sure. Some of the gamemodes aren't too great though (nexball, namely), and the previously mentioned Instagib where everybody has an instant kill point-hurt sniper + blaster combo gun, and you have to keep ammo in your gun or else it counts down from 10 and you die. In addition to those, there are a few that are almost always completely ignored, like Assault, where you have to besiege a castle while turrets and other players shoot at you. The one map that supports this game mode was really fun, and I don't often see too many other user-made maps that support it either, so I'm pretty disappointed in that small aspect.
Before getting into multiplayer and being destroyed by people who've played the game far longer than you have, it would be wise to play through the campaign to get a feel for the game. I say 'campaign', but it's just a string of levels with bots and various game modes. The bots have gotten better since I first played Xonotic in version 0.7, but they still can never match a player who's played for an hour or two. A story could have been put in place of a string of bot-killing-sprees, but I don't think a story would compliment the multiplayer-focused core gameplay of murdering people in a myriad of colorful environments, so I won't consider that a flaw. The regular singleplayer 'campaign' does a fine job teaching you everything you need to know about playing out in the wild, so it does its job alright.
Overall, Xonotic is a fantastic game with a lot of content, a good difficulty curve because of the singleplayer, excellent visuals, and the most swood controls you've ever seen. While the playerbase is rather lacking in, well, amount of people, you could help fix that by playing Xonotic! Maybe I'll encounter you. Xonotic rightfully earns my 10/10 score.
Xonotic (www.xonotic.org) is free and open-source. Released on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. Not on Steam. Get it today!