First-Person Shooter Game for Linux: Warsow Review

It's been a while since I last reviewed a shooter game for Linux, and one of them was World of Padman (reviewed here), which was a cartoon-like, funny first-person shooter. Well, the same goes for Warsow, the game I'm going to talk about in this article. Every graphical aspect of Warsow indicates we're dealing with a cartoon-like universe, from the character models to weapons and maps.

Warsow 0.5

Warsow is a free, open-source game providing a fast-paced gameplay and taking place in a futuristic, cartoon-like world. The game features several popular game modes which are characteristic to almost any FPS, but also some particular ones. To list them: Capture the Flag (CTF), Free for All (FFA), Team Deathmatch (TDM), Clan Arena, Instagib, Race and Duel. Three new game modes have been introduced in version 0.5, the last release of Warsow: Team Domination, Headhunt, Bomb & Defuse.


You can play online joining one of the servers in the servers list or you can play a local game. The good thing about local games is that Warsow implements bot support. First start a game and then press ~ to open the console and type: g_numbots NUMBER_OF_BOTS e.g.:

g_numbots 6

This will add 6 bots to the game.

There are a lot of online servers, and you can find players at any time. Playing online increases considerably the fun, especially since there are a lot of custom maps, for example the remake of the Quake 3 map DM17 below:


Players of games like Unreal Tournament, Urban Terror or Enemy Territory will be thrilled to see that Warsow offers the so-called 'trickjumps' too, which usually require skill and time to learn. Here they are called 'walljumps', and can be combined with several other techniques, like quick acceleration (dash), dodging, unlimited acceleration on ramps (ramp slide) or double dash jump. These combined can make the difference between a truly skilled player and the average gamer.


Warsow comes with some nice background music, and the sounds seem like they're taken from an animation movie for kids, which makes it really funny.

Warsow can run in fullscreen or windowed mode, and provides a lot of options to setup the player, configure the graphics, sound, voice messages and keyboard controls.

Along with the features mentioned above, Warsow also provides a dedicated scripting system, called AngelScript, which provides the community with ways of developing new maps and mods.

According to an updated posted on September 5 on the official Warsow blog, the next version, 0.55, will feature several new maps, a tutorial map, a new chat console and a new crosshair featuring a damage indicator in a Quake Live style.




Conclusion
Final thoughts: Warsow is a lot, I mean a *lot* of fun. It's very fast-paced, giving the impression that you're racing around and fraggin', doesn't need an expensive video card to play (runs very well on my Core 2 Duo 1.8 GHz, 1 GB RAM and nVIDIA GeForce 7600 GS), comes with both single player and multi player support and offers many interesting modes beside the well-known ones. So, if you haven't tried it yet, don't hesitate to do it now.

Official website
Download Warsow
FAQ - you really need to read this is you want to learn how to master Warsow