VentureBeat » Ace of Spades

Ace of Spades, Brick-Force, and Guncraft fire away in a block-shooter faceoff

Giancarlo Valdes — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 23:30:14 +0000

Like movies, games tend to follow certain trends. Action games became more cinematic after the bloody debut of God of War. Cover-based third-person shooters proliferated after the success of Gears of War. And more recently, some indie developers are flocking to the blocky graphics made popular by Minecraft.

Specifically, they’re adding guns and explosions to the basic block-building gameplay. On the PC, at least three first-person multiplayer shooters use this same premise: Jagex’s Ace of Spades (out now for $9.99), Infernum Productions’s Brick-Force (free-to-play as either a download or in your browser), and Exato Game Studios’s Guncraft (releasing this spring for $15). You can carve and shape the battlefield in hundreds of ways in each game, making it hard to tell what the differences are just from looking at videos or screenshots. So we decided to see for ourselves what each one has to offer.

Crafting

Ace of Spades

Ace of Spades uses a class-based system: The choices are the Miner, Commando, Marksman, or Rocketeer. Though each one comes with their own arsenal, all of them can build and destroy levels using guns and melee weapons like spades and pickaxes (the only mode you can’t build anything in is in “classic” capture-the-flag matches). The Miner can get through more blocks — his spade can take out whole walls at a time – than the others, who can only dismantle one or two blocks per hit.

Besides building with individual blocks, you can use premade structures called prefabs to improve your defenses or to lay down a new path, such as small platforms, towers, and staircases. However, nearly five months after its launch on Steam, Ace of Spades still doesn’t have the tools to let players create their own maps.

Brick-Force

Brick-Force has an elegant setup for community-made maps – Infernum highlights a new one every week on its website, and the most popular maps are in regular rotation on the servers. Level building is fairly straightforward: You plop down into a barren landscape and choose different brick types from a menu. You can use specialized abilities and items, like lighting bricks on fire or placing gun turrets, but you can only put down a small number of them. You can also join or create specific “build rooms” so others can come in and help you build a new map.

Guncraft

Guncraft also emphasizes player-made maps. You’ll often find matches based on custom maps rather than those created by the developers. One neat feature in the map editor is that you can generate random terrain like a river, a desert, or frozen tundra. You can even design your own custom prefabs.

What may become the most impressive part of Guncraft is the actual gun crafting, a feature that’s not out yet (it’s coming after launch). By using a similar grid-like interface from the map editor, you can customize the look of your weapon before you bring it online. You’ll have points that you can pour into different stats — vehicle damage, player damage, bullets per shot, and such — but Exato is still working the kinks out, as gun crafting might lead to some seriously overpowered weapons if the studio isn’t careful.

Notable multiplayer modes

All three of these shooters have the usual selection of multiplayer matches we’ve seen and played countless times before (team deathmatch, capture the flag, and so on), so here’s a look at the modes that stand out for each game:

Ace of Spades

Despite how overused the undead are in FPS games, Ace of Spade’s Zombie Survival mode isn’t half bad. You only have a minute or two to find a place to hide or defend yourself before someone in the map is randomly picked as the first zombie. The zombies must kill all the survivors before the timer is up.

Once turned into a zombie, you have a few options. Zombies can tear through blocks almost as effectively as the Miner, and they can build their own prefabs. On your minimap, you can also see the heartbeats of the leftover human players, indicating the general area in which they’re hiding. The mode plays out like a frantic game of tagging as you try to build yourself an escape route or dig underground and hope the zombies don’t find you.

Brick-Force

Brick-Force’s Build ‘n Destroy mode boils down the genre into its essential ingredients. Teams go through two distinct phases during a match: the first to build, and the second to fight each other and destroy (the host can customize how long each phase lasts), with a semi-transparent wall separating both sides during the building time. After a match ends, the process repeats, but this time you can improve your existing fortifications from the last round. It’s just a shame that not too many people actually play this — you might find a room or two among a sea of team deathmatches when searching the servers.

Guncraft

If you want to take a break from shooting other block people in the face, the best way to spend that time is in Lava Survival. Players must race to the top of a map — or build a new way to get there — before a rising pool of lava consumes them (the speed it rises varies from map to map). But instead of killing other people with your guns, you can freeze them for a few seconds, which is a death sentence if the lava is nearby. The optional hookshot weapon (similar to a grappling hook) is your best friend here, as you can use it to quickly move away from the lava … or accidentally fall into it if you miss your next shot.

Cool weapons and tools

Ace of Spades

Two guns immediately stand out when you play Ace of Spades: the Drill Cannon and the Snowblower. The former is the exclusive property of the Miner, and he can use it to disintegrate massive rows of blocks in an instant as the drill plows through terrain with ease. It’s not much of an offensive weapon, but it’s fun for making underground tunnels or for weakening your opponent’s base.

The Snowblower, meanwhile, is a handy build tool as well as a deadly weapon. It rapidly fires blocks of ice, making it useful for plugging up holes in your base or building new walls. Any player that gets caught in its path will die within a few shots.

Brick-Force

Brick-Force’s in-game store has a lot of odd accessories and silly costumes for you to put on. Want to dress up like Batman with a cowl and a cape? You can do that. You can also buy or rent (using either in-game currency earned from playing or real world money) a jetpack, new materials to build (such as anti-gravity nodes), new guns (you start out with a submachine gun and a pistol), and new melee weapons (including pitchforks and frying pans). While the weapons all have different stats and functions, buying them is more or less an aesthetic choice.

Guncraft

The real stars of Guncraft’s combat are the vehicles. Taking a page from Electronic Arts’ Battlefield series, players can take control of helicopters, massive gunships, tanks, and even Star Wars-like hover bikes. Some maps already come with a few vehicles, but others become accessible only when you gain a certain amount of kills (borrowing Call of Duty’s killstreak bonuses). They don’t always work — helicopters and tanks can sometimes get stuck inside a building or in the ground– but it’s a minor trade-off for the chaos that ensues as blocks and gunfire fly across the screen.

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GamesBeat weekly roundup: Wii U launch, Hitman: Absolution, and Persona 4: Golden

Jasmine Maleficent Rea — Sat, 24 Nov 2012 00:00:41 +0000

If you follow VentureBeat but don’t regularly check our GamesBeat site, here’s a list of the best video game stories we ran over the last seven days that you may have missed.

This week, THQ is in talks with a mystery sponsor about “financial alternatives” after its chief financial officer resigned, Treyarch removes the Nuketown map from public matches in Call of Duty: Black Ops II, and Fable creator Peter Molyneux turns to Kickstarter to fund a new “god game” project for his studio 22Cans.

You’ll also find reviews for Hitman: Absolution, Persona 4: Golden, Epic Mickey 2, Epic Mickey: Power of Illusion, Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed, and the Wii U.

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Wii U

Previews

Ace of Spades is much more than just ‘Minecraft with guns’ (hands-on preview)

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Ace of Spades is much more than just ‘Minecraft with guns’ (hands-on preview)

Giancarlo Valdes — Tue, 20 Nov 2012 17:00:35 +0000

One by one, the survivors disappeared. I managed to escape to the top of a tower, making sure to blow up pieces of the spiral staircase below me so that the zombies wouldn’t follow. With a couple hundred feet separating me from the bloodbath below, I was confident that I was going to make it out alive.

I was wrong.

Before I knew it, the tower came crashing down. The undead plowed through the building’s foundation in no time, tipping the tower over and scattering hundreds of blocks as I fell. They immediately pounced on my dying corpse, feasting on my cube-shaped organs with glee.

Zombie mode is just one aspect of Ace of Spades, the first-person shooter from developer Jagex that combines Minecraft’s retro aesthetic and creativity with class-based multiplayer. It’s a formula that had already proved successful, when an early prototype of the game came out almost two years ago boasting 300,000 to 500,000 monthly active users.

This version of Ace of Spades will release on PCs via Steam some time in December, with a price — according to Jagex brand director Rob Kinder – “somewhere around the $10 mark.”

Build, build, build

Like Minecraft before it, the environment is free for you to destroy or build as you see fit — except that you have an entire team of people trying to shoot you in the face while you’re doing it. Deciding whether you should dive right into the firefight or carve out a part of the map to hide and sneak through is half the fun.

Every class in the game has an assortment of weapons, at least one tool to dig with, and the ability to instantly place a (still unspecified) finite number of blocks. But some classes are better at building things than others. The Engineer has a landmine that can take out large chunks of the environment along with a spade that knocks out two blocks at a time. The Miner is the weakest class offensively, but his spade takes out a whopping 18 blocks at a time; he also has a tunnel gun (which clears a path in a nine-block radius), and some deadly dynamite (which is ideal for planting in an enemy base).

The two other classes, Soldier and Sniper, each have a lowly pickaxe good for chipping away at the map one block at a time. But with firepower that includes rocket launchers and miniguns, it’s safe to say that they’ll be the ones trying to protect the buildings rather than contribute to their construction.

All of them, though, have access to “Prefabs,” which are larger premade structures unique to each class:.The ones I saw included a raised square-shaped platform, a staircase, and a small bunker. Prefabs let you quickly build a defensive position if the block-by-block method is taking too long. While a level editor won’t be not in the game at launch, Jagex is planning to have one available as soon as possible.

A changing battlefield

With the initial absence of user-created levels, you’ll have to make do with the 10 to 12 (Jagex is still deciding) developer-made maps that come with Ace of Spades. At the preview event, Jagex showed three of them: a Mayan temple map, where a handful of other journalists and I played team deathmatch; a haunted house-themed area for the aforementioned Zombie mode; and another deathmatch on a lunar base, where we had to adjust for the change in gravity.

One of the more interesting things about these maps is that the level of destruction persists through consecutive rounds. By the time we finished surviving against zombies, the house was in shambles, which left us with almost no other places to hide. In the Mayan temple, I attempted to cut off a shortcut between the two main land masses by blowing up the bridge, and it stayed that way until we switched maps. And on the moon, I kept falling into the large underground tunnels created by my fellow teammates.

Communication is key as loosing track of your opponents is really easy when they dig into the environment. If you’re too preoccupied trying to build a work of art, like I was, don’t be surprised if someone knocks it down with a well-placed shot from the rocket launcher. I died rather quickly during each match — with the exception of the undead, it doesn’t take too many bullets to kill one another.

The real satisfaction, though, comes from blowing things up or knocking them down. As I learned in Zombie mode, if you decimate a structure’s foundation, it will topple over. If anything, the destruction teaches you to keep moving whether you’re running above or below the ground. It was absolute chaos with just five players. I’m almost scared to imagine what it’s like when the capacity maxes out at 32.

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Minecraft-like first-person shooter heads to Steam in December

Jeffrey Grubb — Thu, 01 Nov 2012 15:42:41 +0000

Minecraft is cool, but it just doesn’t have enough team deathmatch. That’s where first-person shooter Ace of Spades comes in handy.

Development studio Jagex, along with Minecraft’s original indie developers, announced today that it is bringing a full version of Ace of Spades to Valve’s Steam download service in December.

Ace of Spades is retro-looking shooter in which up to 32 players face-off in a fully constructible (and then destructible) environment. You can shape each level, Minecraft style, to better help defend them from the enemy team.

“If you’re tired of the same-old first-person shooters, coming out year after year with a fresh lick of paint and a hefty price tag, then Ace of Spades will tick all the boxes for you, offering an all action multiplayer featuring up to 32-player FPS combat and a fully customizable environment which will continuously develop throughout your battle,” Jagex chief marketing officer David Solari said.

“Despite keeping this game under the radar during development, it has still proved to be hugely viral, with more than two and half a million players entering the prototype phase. Ace of Spades is set to take FPS to the next level, adding evolving tactics and strategy to twitch FPS gameplay. We have blended the artistic style of voxel-based sandbox games, such as Minecraft, with the class based combat of titles like Team Fortress, and added an extra dimension with real-time evolving battlefields to create a game which we firmly believe will appeal to FPS gamers looking for a bigger challenge.”

Ace of Spades has been out for more than a year in prototype form. More than 550,000 users started playing it each month. Jagex came on board to support the original development team and to help prepare a final version for release. That release features improved graphics and more weapons compared to the incomplete game.

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