SourceForts v1.9.0 review

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SourceForts v1.9.0 - Capture the Flag - Source Engine

If you own Half-Life 2 then do yourself a favor, before reading another word hop over to Sourcefortsmod.com and find a download, this short review should keep you occupied until you get all of the...building goodness?

Yes building, done in a way that I've spent the past few days deciding whether or not to rebuild my once glorious tower, or study for a mid-term, or eat, an affliction as deadly for me as Natural-Selection has been. Now normally modifications are not my cup of tea, preferring the all out redesigns of a total conversion to really intrigue me, though really when you can spend half of the game designing a stronghold for your flag and the other half navigating the enemy's, who needs a remodelled rocket launcher right now?

At first glance, the idea seems rather simple, most people run for the larger platforms and construct walls, or get a few longer ones to make a ramp onto higher portions of the maps, which by the way are well designed to allow freedom of construction while lending a few ideas. Though when you see four people working together to construct a small bunker in the sky, or how swiftly people can route every enemy runner around to the back, up some stairs, and into a small crawl space where every step of the way we can send volleys of rockets, and the constant reconfiguring as the enemy plans for your building and you replan against theirs, the full volume of concept hits you.

Lacking the bullets, explosions, chasing down the flag, and running for your life with it, that construction phase is as nerve wracking as the real fight, some people will cry a loss when every piece is not perfectly set, maybe the game is for pessimists, though you can at times agree with them. Especially after a minute long ordeal revolving around whether that ramp should be there to run out or run in can be heard, and even moreso when you run by and snag it to make the roof to the "Blue Flag's Dream Mansion and Brothel Playset."

Rounds change between phases of building or rebuilding and phases of attempting to capture the enemy flag while guarding your own, hopefully this can be expanded further to include gametypes such as Domination, King of the Hill, Territory, etc.. Construction is very straightforward, simply grab a piece with your grav gun, and then freeze it when it is floating how you want and it will snap right in place, unfreeze it when you want to move it again. All objects are subject to physics while unfrozen, though you can create floating structures, and use the physics engine to your advantage to create different angles, it is just a lot cooler to put a dome over your flag than a weak roof.

The various classes in the game bring a bit of control to the way you'll be playing, snipers often create covered open viewed areas, while rocketeers...guess what they use, try to force runners to slow down with jumps and crawl, and so forth. They cover the base of what you need, scouts will be running, soldiers are spraying down whomever, engineers get to repair walls as well as deconstruct them though this has been a challenge, and all take from unending supply boxes and health and armor recharge stations strictly per team.

These do lend, along with the design skills of many players, to very low scoring rounds, often one cap can win it for you, and it isn't rare to have entire teams lacking any runner, which is perhaps my only actual concern. Maps are often so small that you can cover the entirity of it from a static position, layouts often allow teams to limit to one entrance, and the weapons are powerful enough to make running less than fun. Not to mention, the insanely high health values most blocks have, provided by server admins I have heard, means puncturing defenses which are not even being repaired is a constant team effort.

Of course, the biggest reason to try out SourceForts is because, you just haven't played anything like it, it focuses on a concept that couldn't have been done until recently, does it very well, and more than that, simply, perhaps one of the easiest games to get into which you've never experienced.