Do you yearn for the first person shooter days of yore, way back before modern amenities such as jump and strafe came along to wuss things up? Yearn no more, because Copasetic Games has you covered in their latest retro FPS Xbox LIVE Indie Game offering, Dangerous Conflicts 3D. But just because you can make a retro FPS, does it mean you should?

Gameplay

Dangerous Conflicts 3D is a first person shooter that attempts to recreate the look and feel of the prolific games that created the genre. Regrettably, Dangerous Conflicts 3D succeeds and fails at this on multiple levels.

The controls of the game are true to its roots, forgoing many of the modern conveniences that make the genre tolerable. As such, jumping, strafing, and aiming independent of movement are all painfully absent from the game. While one may be able to reconcile these omissions beneath the banner of retro, there are plenty of other issues that cannot.

Falling into the aforementioned category we have enemies. There are two different styles of enemies in Dangerous Conflicts 3D: immobile and mobile. The immobile enemy robots will simply remain stationary while sometimes firing at you. I say sometimes because sometimes they just stand there, doing nothing for no apparent reason. Mobile adversaries are identical to the immobile except that they patrol a short distance back and forth while firing in your general direction. Projectiles fired by both classes of robot enemies are large, seemingly occupying a hit box nearly as large as you.

The sheer size of the projectiles combined with the utter rubbish controls make it an irritating challenge to fire with any sort of accuracy at an enemy. Fortunately, the enemy robots seem to be especially incompetent. In fact, they are such terrible guard robots, you can quite literally just run past them with little to no worry of being hit. This effectively makes the whole “shooter” angle of this FPS wholly optional on many stages.

Speaking of levels, there are eleven. Each of which takes at most two minutes to complete and most taking less than a minute. That’s right, you can walk through this game in about ten minutes. Even at the dollar price point thats not a particularly great value proposition.

Audio/Visual

The game looks horrendous even when compared to the twenty-year-old experiences it seeks to recreate. The walls of every stage are covered in textures so ugly a 1970’s couch would be embarrassed to wear them. In contrast to the walls, the robot enemies almost look acceptable. That’s not to say they aren’t obscenely janky, just that the walls are really that ugly. As previously mentioned, there are two different types of robot, both of which share the same ugly model with just inverted color schemes.

The only glint of amusement I garnered from this game was in the user interface, which contains an Easter egg reference to the first Terminator movie. Otherwise the UI is also exceptionally underdeveloped, filled with things not suitable as place holder graphics.

Dangerous Conflict 3D‘s audio fits right in with the rest of the game. It has a couple sound effects, one of which is a really bad death sound and the other is a really bad firing sound. Both of which mesh nicely with the music loop that runs for a few seconds and then takes a couple seconds of awkward silence before going at it again.

Summary

Poor controls, bad graphics, and zero story place this game squarely in the don’t buy category. Whether it is a reasonable homage to FPS genre pioneers or not is irrelevant, it’s simply not a good game. However if you find that you must, you can pick the game up for 80 Microsoft Points on the XBox Indie Games marketplace.