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The action itself takes place from a 3rd person point of view and although it's not anywhere near as sophisticated as Heretic II; it's still a joy to play. Ducking, weaving, strafing, jumping and somersaulting are all possible. The camera does shift (intelligently) to match the landscape's topography and to make it easier to conjure up a few moves. Playing the game can be done via the Keyboard, Mouse, a combination of both and finally with a Force Feedback stick. For the best results we used a Keyboard and mouse combo although playing with a Joypad was almost as precise and still very playable.
As you'd expect from Rage Software, the 3D engine is very capable and has been specifically optimized for DirectX 6.0. The development of the new engine took place at the Newcastle branch and boasts an incredibly long list of special graphical effects. Providing you've got the hardware required then you can expect to see evidence of, Bump Mapping, Environment Mapping, Texture Compression in hardware (known as S3TC or DXT), anti-aliasing support, Calibrated Gamma Ramp support (eg. Colorific 3Deep), AMD-optimised geometry pipeline code, Intel P3-optimised geometry pipeline code, Mip Mapping and Trilinear Filtering.
Shadow effects, Dynamic Light-Sourcing, High-Resolution Textures, Texture Scaling for Low Ram/Low Spec Video cards, Extended AGP Support, Advanced particle engine, Extended use of Alpha Rendering, Keyframe Interpolated Character Animation, Reflective Surfaces, Video Texturing, Triple Buffering, lens effects such as Flares, Coronas, light volume rendering, procedural textures, full parallelism exposed, user-selectable scalability and detail settings will also make appearances. Last and by no means least the game can be played in 16, 24 and 32-bit modes and in resolutions as high as 1600x1200. An impressive list and providing you own a D3D compliant 3D card, the above list should feature prominently for you.
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