Saturday 26 December 2009

Full Review: Nexuiz 2.5.2 - Free First-Person Shooter for Linux

Nexuiz is one of the most popular shooter games which emerged after the open-sourcing of the Quake 3 engine, featuring a fast-paced game style and several game modes, like the popular DM or CTF. Nexuiz is a free, GPL-licensed, first-person shooter developed online by the Internet-based team Alientrap, and it comes with ports for Linux, Windows and Mac.

Nexuiz 2.5.2

Ever since it was launched, in May 2005, Nexuiz went through a lot of changes and evolved with every release. The 2.5 series bring many improvements, featuring new graphics, new maps and an even faster gameplay. The latest version is 2.5.2, a bug-fix release to the stable 2.5 release. To test the latest Nexuiz, download the Zip archive from the official website (direct link here), uncompress it, and then run the binary specific to your OS (the archive includes binaries for Linux, as well as Windows and Mac).

Nexuiz - choosing the player model

Nexuiz 2.5 offers a futuristic interface, with fast access to settings and other configuration options. One of the nice things which bumped out when configuring the keys was that Nexuiz allows for switching between fullscreen and windowed mode just by pressing a key, even if the game is running. Older versions of Nexuiz used Shift+Esc in order to open the console, but it looks like in 2.5 you can use the classic ` key.

The server browser

Besides multiplayer, Nexuiz also includes support for bots and a singleplayer campaign. It comes with 15 player models, 13 weapons and 24 official maps, music and original character and weapon sounds.

Nexuiz will run smoothly on older machines at 1024x768, but you will need a decent video card to enjoy it on higher resolutions at a steady framerate. However, lowering texture details and particle details will help if you have an older video card and CPU.


Overall, I think Alientrap is doing a great job by continuously developing this game, which became one of the favourite FPS games for Linux users, together with other well-known names like OpenArena or Tremulous.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

I didn't download this, but to have a near 1G download that has separate binaries for Windows, Linux and Mac seems to be a waste of bandwidth and download times. Maybe I am missing something.

Anonymous said...

Actually it's based on the DarkPlaces engine which is a Quake 1 and not Quake 3 engine as the article implies(which makes it that more awesome), although it has support for loading q3 models.

Anonymous said...

Just wanted to add if you are interested in reviewing a game which makes use of Quake 3 engine please consider Alien Arena

Anonymous said...

Alien Arena is based off of the Q2 engine, not Q3. It looks alot better than this though.

flashgames said...

I second Alien Arena.... thats a great game

Anonymous said...

Older machines How much older?

decent video card How "decent" is "decent"?

The 2nd-to-last paragraph is worthless.