Gore: Ultimate Soldier review (PC)

One unique aspect of the character models is that armor actually appears on and protects the part of the body that it's supposed to. For instance, you can target a piece of chest armor, and it will deteriorate and then burst apart as you damage it.

Like most things in Gore, the sound effects are not bad while at the same time being completely unmemorable. The enemies do have an annoying habit of screaming the same few catchphrases over and over again, however.

The first thing you'll notice about Gore's multiplayer game is that it's really fast paced. Player-movement speed appears to be faster than in the original Quake, Daikatana, and even the most recent Gore demo. It offers class-based deathmatch, team deathmatch, and capture-the-flag modes. There are also four "tactical" gameplay types: assault, which is like the recent Soldier of Fortune II's infiltration mode; extermination, a last-man-standing game; escape; and an escort-the-VIP mode called infiltration. There's a built-in server browser, though it doesn't support sorting the list by its various columns. With about 22 weapons, a frantic pace, a nice variety of levels, and what seems to be decent, stable net code, Gore's multiplayer game is certainly not bad. However, at the moment (a week after its release) there's virtually nobody playing online. There aren't a whole lot of servers, which wouldn't be so bad if those few servers had a good number of people playing. Unfortunately, they're just about empty at all times. Unless things change dramatically over the next several weeks, you'll have a difficult time finding a decent match online.

Gore is a decent game, but there isn't anything here that hasn't been done already--and better--in a game you probably already own.