The term Free2Play has, in recent years, become a tarnished one, usually associated with sleazy business practices, unbalanced gameplay and young children naively flushing hundreds of pounds of their parents’ cash away on app games. With the advent of the Pay2Win model, riding on the consumer friendly stallion of F2P like a black knight, most gamers have been wary of the concept and with good reason; aside from a few standouts such as Team Fortress 2, Tribes: Ascend and Planetside 2, most of F2P games can’t be trusted. I am pleased to inform you, however, that Loadout, an arena-combat third person shooter from Edge of Reality Studios, is another addition to the stable of F2P games that is not only fair to consumers, but is also a generally excellent game.
Loadout is an arena game, focused entirely on an online experience against other players. It boasts three prominent features; cartoonish visuals, gory slapstick-based humour and extensive gun customisation, and as a result invites comparison to Team Fortress 2 and the Borderlands games.
With the characters able to soak a reasonable amount of damage, move quickly, jump high and dodge attacks by rolling, combat is frantic and acrobatic. At long range, well-placed shots that whittle down opponents before they can dart to cover are key, and up close the key to victory is speed and the ability to time dodges and shots correctly. It makes fights challenging and dynamic, and even killing one opponent feels satisfying. Combined with the games gory slapstick and dark humour and it makes Loadout an incredibly fun and lovably daft experience.
The gameplay is divided into four different modes: Death Snatch, Blitz, Jackhammer and Extraction. They’re all fairly standard variations on deathmatch, point capture, capture the flag and objective grab game types, but the Jackhammer mode had an interesting twist on capture flag with the flag being a massive hammer capable of dealing massive splash damage and becoming more valuable with every kill made. The choice between making a safer but less valuable run straight to the drop-off point or risking death for a greater payoff adds a tactical choice to the game mode which makes it much more interesting.
Gunfights are mixed up with special equipment that players can deploy. These range from grenades, doing the typical grenadey thing of high damage over a wide area, to shields which make your players more durable, to turrets that can be dropped across the battlefield to guard key points. Other upgrades include one that can mark you as a friendly on enemy screens, and the ability to lay booby-trapped health and equipment pickups on the map.
Satisfying and enjoyable as the gameplay is, my favourite part of Loadout is the weapon customisation. The game has four basic weapon classes; rifle, launcher, pulse and beam. Each one of them can be extensively modified by the player by adding on new components which alter their stats and the way they play. Want to snipe enemy players? Just add a sniper scope, sniper barrel and a bolt-action magazine onto the basic rifle. Sure, you’ll be firing slowly but you’ll hit like a ton of bricks from long distance. Alternatively, if you want to take out lots of enemies at once, just spec up a launcher to fire clusters of missiles across large areas. Weapons can also have more unusual features, such as healing allied players or doing damage over time with incendiary ammunition. Typically, most players seem to find a pair of weapons they like and stick with them; my two mainstays are ‘The Piecemaker’, a shotgun, backed up by a raygun going by the name ‘Nikola’s Revenge!’.
The system is surprisingly well-balanced, with each perk having a countering penalty, and as a result the game is reliant on player skill rather than who can build the most lethal gun. This gun customisation partly incorporates the F2P system, with upgrades unlocked via a resource called ‘Blutes’, which are unlocked in-game. While it’s definitely a case of the better you do, the more you earn, players can pay to earn Blutes twice as fast in a single match, and even though players can technically pay to unlock better gear the guns are so well-balanced that a player with a completely unornamented weapon could take on a paying player and still have a good chance of winning. As well implemented and extensive as it is, I find it slightly disappointing that, as far as I can tell, there’s no way to change how the gun looks, and instead all weapons come in the same shades of olive green and black.
The main F2P elements come from SpaceBux, an ingame currency that can be bought at a rough rate of 600SB for $1. These provide purely cosmetic upgrades for the game’s three, pleasantly inclusive, character avatars, and don’t actually have a tangible effect on gameplay. The prices on the avatar upgrades do seem rather steep, meaning that if you want to personalise them you might have to shell out a fair amount of money.
Aside from that, however, there isn’t really all that much to fault Loadout on. It’s got frantic, incredibly fun gameplay, a fair, consumer-friendly business model and awesome weapon customisation. With its very modest system requirements and the fact that it won’t cost you a penny, there’s not really any reason to avoid playing it; come on and join in, you’re in for a good time!
Verbal Fisticuffs 