This highly anticipated fighting game demo from Diversions includes three fighters, three arenas (including the sports-themed "Laserball"), and two of the single player tournaments.

Battlegrounds is the first on-line, 3D, multiplayer fighting game. OMF:BG represents a serious change in the philosophy of making fighting games. Instead of 2 players facing off in a small space, Battlegrounds features up to sixteen simultaneous players in huge arenas, fighting in team battles or all-out brawls!

Our goal is to free you, the player, from the restrictions of the past, and allow you to fight the way you've always wanted to. Just like your favourite martial-arts movies, you can go toe-to-toe with several opponents, use nearby objects as weapons, and integrate terrain and hazards into your fighting strategy.

DEMO REVIEW
Many gamers find a certain indefinable joy in controlling giant humanoid robots: The concept of being strapped inside a sophisticated and agile uniframe design is surely alluring, as a precise neural link responds to your trigger-happy urges with powerful firepower and vicious mechanized brutality.

One Must Fall: Battlegrounds allows such an experience in a full 3D arena setting, while incorporating some gameplay features we’ve certainly grown accustomed to seeing in console fighters for years. In addition to a training and single player mode, this demo offers online play versus multiple opponents, and it’s often a chaotic show of robotic lunacy as special moves and their accompanying particle effects conspire to fill the screen with severed metallic limbs and wild explosions.

In theory, all of this should propel OMF: Battlegrounds to nu-classic status, since the PC has never really enjoyed a competent 3D fighter, let alone one that can be played online on a whim versus live opponents.

Unfortunately, it’s not all good news. The controls of the three robots in this demo aren’t quite as responsive as one should like, given the intended speed of the action. There is no pause for strategy here; this is fast and furious combat, and despite differing strengths being ‘imbued’ into each robot via your chosen pilot, there’s a tangible clumsiness to the fighting controls.

It’s unquestionably quite playable and adequately responsive, but the stunted intuitiveness is enough to prevent the player from truly feeling that ‘neural link’ with their ‘bot. This sensation certainly isn’t mollified by the limited selection of moves for each fighter. You have left and right side punches and kicks, a jump and an evade, and there are multiple tap-tap combinations to perfect, enabling faster dodging, chain combos, juggles and aerials.

Though each fighter has various ordnance and melee, ranging from Jaguar’s energy blade attack and Wolverine-like slashing to Force’s gravity-altering shielding and meteor attacks, the basic button sequences are remarkably similar across the board.

The good news is that each fighter is well balanced, and creative use of Energy (to power the massive special attacks) can yield some fairly satisfying battles, especially in multiplayer. Sadly, the free-roaming arenas in this demo don’t offer much in the way of interactivity to spice up the proceedings.

OMF: Battleground’s polish in other areas in pretty minimal. All the selection screens are absolutely basic and do very little to evoke extreme robot crunching mayhem before battles begin. The arena environments are moderately detailed, while the robots showcase pretty good pseudo-reflective textures and decent animation.

The soundtrack is a crisp synthy affair, effectively matching the theme of the futuristic tournament, but sound effects are subdued and lacking in production value. These metallic abominations are begging for some bass heavy ED 209-esque thumps and whirs as they plod around the arena, but there’s nothing that rich to be heard, and the female announcer is atrocious.

With an improved presentation and some overall fine-tuning of controls, this could have been a great little 3D fighter for PC gamers, especially given the online feature.


Demo review by Mike Griffin.

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