Brick-Force

I found out about this game from a video that paulsoaresjr put on YouTube.  He covers various indie games periodically and mentioned that even though Brick-Force is in closed beta, you just sign up and after some arbitrary amount of time they unlock your ability to actually play the game.

So after I got the ability to play the game, I began noticing things wrong with it right away.

Specifically, you move too slowly, there are no health pickups, and I don't seem to be able to right click, which is necessary to use the alternate fire on each weapon.

Speed is kind of a relative thing, so the fact that everyone moves as slow as molasses means there's theoretically a level playing field.  No health pickups is a major insult to FPS players everywhere.  Basically, you're just doomed to die.  Which can happen instantly for reasons I'll get into in a moment.

Me not being able to right click is a strange one indeed.  I think it's because of the retardedly overzealous anti-cheat software they use with the game, called XTrap.  As you might know if you've read my previous posts, I use a program called X-Mouse Button Control to rebind the buttons on my trackball so that I can have the layout I like.  This involves moving the right click button.  Because of how XMBC works, I think XTrap thinks it's a bad program and is blocking it.

Now, on to the major issue affecting gameplay.

The game is set up as a free-to-play game.  Groan.

Basically, as you play the game, you get experience and level up.  You also occasionally get tokens, which can be bought with real money.  Tokens can be used to buy various weapons and other things in-game.  As if that weren't bad enough, giving people who have more money to spare an unfair advantage, everything that isn't base equipment has a timeout, and once it counts all the way down, you lose the item.  There do happen to be medpacks available through this means, but they have limited uses and when you run out of them you'll have to buy more.

So basically the game is unplayable.

Which is a shame, because it's got a neat graphical style and includes a block-based level editor where you can invite friends in to help you build a map, and then when you're done you can play it with people.  That feature sounded really cool, but the rest of the game doesn't keep up.  The default weaponry is utter crap.

The verdict: avoid, as with all free-to-play games.