There are many twitch shooters and arena shooters on Linux but we haven't had too many tactical first-person shooters. Today I will take a look at the just released tactical team-based FPS, Interstellar Marines
Interstellar Marines by Zero Point Software is a science fiction tactical first-person shooter and it's currently available in the Steam's Early Access. Currently it's a multiplayer-only game but the developers have said that they will create a singleplayer campaign, which can also be played in co-op with up to 4 players. They also say that games such as System Shock 2 and Half-Life have inspired their game.
Sadly the game hasn't yet been optimized properly and my quite beefy machine is not able to maintain constant 60 FPS and it frequently drops down to even below 30. It's possible that the Unity engine is a bit of a bottleneck. However the game looks quite nice and the environments work really great. The dynamic environmental changes are also a nice addition to the game. You might start the round in sunshine, but eventually the situation will change and you will have to pull out your flashlight in the middle of complete darkness.
Because the game is not yet done the gameplay is limited to multiplayer and one gamemode, which is basically a capture-point type of a thing. Your objective is to capture as many of the points and defend them, while also killing your opponents. Capturing points also works as a respawn mechanic: when you capture a point one of your dead teammates will respawn immediately. The game ends when the whole team gets wiped out, all points are captured or the time runs out. Simple thing and we've probably seen similar things in other games.
One bad thing I will have to say about the current version is that there aren't simply enough servers to make getting into a game easy. For me only one of the European servers had acceptable ping and it was nearly full all the time. Sometimes the games became annoying too when the skilled players ended up on the opposing team. Because they haven't implemented any automatic team balancing it's up to the players to switch to the other team. The lack of servers also makes it impossible to switch to another server until the teams have eventually gotten more balanced. The game also features a long respawn time, so it might take you a while to get back into the combat unless your team manages to capture enough control points to bring you back.
It's obvious that the game is not done and there isn't too much to do and see, but the game works really well and looks good. For me there isn't enough content at the moment, but the game is still in development and I will absolutely love to see the singleplayer campaign when they roll it out sometime near the end of this year.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Interstellar Marines by Zero Point Software is a science fiction tactical first-person shooter and it's currently available in the Steam's Early Access. Currently it's a multiplayer-only game but the developers have said that they will create a singleplayer campaign, which can also be played in co-op with up to 4 players. They also say that games such as System Shock 2 and Half-Life have inspired their game.
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Sadly the game hasn't yet been optimized properly and my quite beefy machine is not able to maintain constant 60 FPS and it frequently drops down to even below 30. It's possible that the Unity engine is a bit of a bottleneck. However the game looks quite nice and the environments work really great. The dynamic environmental changes are also a nice addition to the game. You might start the round in sunshine, but eventually the situation will change and you will have to pull out your flashlight in the middle of complete darkness.
Because the game is not yet done the gameplay is limited to multiplayer and one gamemode, which is basically a capture-point type of a thing. Your objective is to capture as many of the points and defend them, while also killing your opponents. Capturing points also works as a respawn mechanic: when you capture a point one of your dead teammates will respawn immediately. The game ends when the whole team gets wiped out, all points are captured or the time runs out. Simple thing and we've probably seen similar things in other games.
One bad thing I will have to say about the current version is that there aren't simply enough servers to make getting into a game easy. For me only one of the European servers had acceptable ping and it was nearly full all the time. Sometimes the games became annoying too when the skilled players ended up on the opposing team. Because they haven't implemented any automatic team balancing it's up to the players to switch to the other team. The lack of servers also makes it impossible to switch to another server until the teams have eventually gotten more balanced. The game also features a long respawn time, so it might take you a while to get back into the combat unless your team manages to capture enough control points to bring you back.
It's obvious that the game is not done and there isn't too much to do and see, but the game works really well and looks good. For me there isn't enough content at the moment, but the game is still in development and I will absolutely love to see the singleplayer campaign when they roll it out sometime near the end of this year.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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The max slots count is 16 per server. The 2 free slots are for spectating only.
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Quoting: NoXPhasmaThe max slots count is 16 per server. The 2 free slots are for spectating only.Yeah, I figured that out quite soon. I was spamming the button just to make sure I get into the game when there is a slot available.
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Hey I was just playing with you my second time ( a whole of 10 - 15 minutes play time for me). The FPS is weird I cant change screen resolution - it doesn't scale properly and everything goes completely wrong I have to then click windowed mode and it resets back to 1080p also after initial configuration I don't think it changes the settings - I get the same fps whether I am on very low or ultra settings and everything turned on - it definitely has bugs and the mouse is not smooth its a bit jerky - but on ultra it does look really good - it has great potential - I bought it just to say thank you to the devs for supporting Linux - hopefully it improves with the windows version.
As it is right now I don't think I am going to play it for a while give it a couple of months and I will try it again.
As an FYI I am running steam os, gtx 780 (factory overclocked pny - it performs about the same as a 780ti), 16G Ram, i7 4780K and a 240G SSD - Very decent setup I get great fps in Metro Last Light - about the same specs as the Steam OS boxes Valve were handing out to the beta testers.
I think it might be good to start listing and tracking all of the issues we are seeing with these early steam games - some of them play perfect, a couple don't even start - a few anomalies with graphics (the resolution is really low when in the selections menu then jumps really high) I really need to set up another ssd and test the Linux client and see how much of the graphics anomalies is down to the steam os layer.
All I can say is I really hope steam os takes off - its a pretty damn fantastic idea and its like a massive adrenaline jab into desktop linux as it pushes the whole of the core desktop / gl technologies which will filter back down to the de's.
As it is right now I don't think I am going to play it for a while give it a couple of months and I will try it again.
As an FYI I am running steam os, gtx 780 (factory overclocked pny - it performs about the same as a 780ti), 16G Ram, i7 4780K and a 240G SSD - Very decent setup I get great fps in Metro Last Light - about the same specs as the Steam OS boxes Valve were handing out to the beta testers.
I think it might be good to start listing and tracking all of the issues we are seeing with these early steam games - some of them play perfect, a couple don't even start - a few anomalies with graphics (the resolution is really low when in the selections menu then jumps really high) I really need to set up another ssd and test the Linux client and see how much of the graphics anomalies is down to the steam os layer.
All I can say is I really hope steam os takes off - its a pretty damn fantastic idea and its like a massive adrenaline jab into desktop linux as it pushes the whole of the core desktop / gl technologies which will filter back down to the de's.
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