Published 20th of January 2004

Almost 10 years since the release of the original, One Must Fall: Battlegrounds is finally here. It's the first ever massively multiplayer 3D online fighting game, but does it work?

Platform: PC Developer: Diversions Entertainment Publisher: Diversions Publishing/Tri Synergy (North America), GMX Media (Europe), Manaccom (Australia) Released: December 2003

SCREENSHOTS What do these ratings mean?

Minimum Requirements:

Pentium III or AMD Athlon 733
128 MB RAM
16MB 3D card
Windows 98/ME/2000/XP

Recommended Requirements:

Pentium III or AMD Athlon 1 Ghz or greater
256 MB RAM
32-128MB 3D card

Test System:

Pentium 4 2.4 Ghz
512 MB RAM
GeForce 4 Ti 4800SE 128MB
Windows XP
Tested with both Broadband and Dialup Internet

Old school PC gamers are a dying breed, but most old school PC gamers should remember a 1994 DOS game titled One Must Fall: 2097. Developed by the little known Diversions Entertainment, it was really the last exclusive PC fighting game that made a good impression. For those of you who can’t remember the good old days of DOS gaming, OMF: 2097 was a simple 2D fighter where you controlled a giant robot and battled through one-on-one fights. While simple, it worked incredibly well and even supported some of the first modem-to-modem play on the PC. Since then, PC fighting games have simply been ports of arcade or console fighting titles, and they mostly lacked the finesse and polish on the PC. In recent times, fighting titles have simply just ceased to be ported to PC with developers deciding that they are best left on consoles or at the arcades. Well, Diversions Entertainment have decided to change all of that and develop a sequel to their 1994 classic. The new game, One Must Fall: Battlegrounds, was released late 2003, meaning stalwart fans of the original needed to wait almost ten years for the sequel. Has it been worth the wait?

One Must Fall: Battlegrounds differs from its predecessor is many ways. First and foremost, the game is now completely in 3D, and it seems to have done away with the somewhat anime style of the original. Secondly, the game is no longer really a one-on-one fighter. While the game can certainly be played with just two players, it’s rather boring that way, especially when the game supports up to 16 simultaneous players, either online over the Internet or over a LAN. Fundamentally however, the basic gameplay hasn’t changed an incredible deal. You pick a pilot, just as you did in the original, with stats that affect how your robot performs. You then pick a robot, and you have one of eight different robots to choose from - and this is the first letdown right off the bat. While there are only 10 pilots available initially, some quick playing through the game’s single player mode can unlock more, to a total of 50, but there’s only eight different robots to choose from (which is actually less robots than you had to choose from in the original), with no extra robots available to be unlocked. While the differing pilot stats do make a noticeable difference during play, having only eight robots to choose from really doesn’t offer a huge variety in terms of battle techniques, particularly when most seasoned fighting game veterans are expecting to see more variety in sequels.

The control system has been changed slightly from the original too. Gone is the really basic attack system that was present in OMF: 2097, each of your robot’s limbs are now controlled individually. You have left and right punch, and left and right kick. Pressing certain movement directions simultaneously with these attack buttons affect how strong or fast the attacks are. Pressing combinations of the attack buttons executes other more powerful moves, and when combined with combinations of movement directions, special moves and throws can be performed. There’s also a jump button and an evade button, and of course your standard movement directions. You’ll be watching your robot through a 3rd person behind view, much like many 3rd person adventure games, and so the controls obviously work for this view; meaning direction up is move forward, direction down is move backward, and left and right turn around. The game defaults to entirely keyboard use, which could pose as an awkward problem to PC players who are used to utilising the services of the mouse, but after a while you’ll realise that the game really doesn’t have a place for it. The keys can also be mapped however you like, which is a good thing since the default key mapping is very unergonomic, and the game supports gamepads and joysticks if you have one and decide that it’s a better alternative to the keyboard. If you don’t have a gamepad, it’s true that the keyboard controls can become a little cumbersome after an hour or two of continuous play, but overall the control system works just fine. It actually does a pretty good job of sticking close enough to the gameplay of the original for fans to easily get into it, and offer enough change and evolution to classify it as a worthy sequel. It’s not the first fighting game to have done this of course as virtually every fighting game that has at least one sequel has done it, but OMF: BG is the first fighting game to my knowledge to make such a big leap in game engine in one go and still manage to pull it off. Several fighting game franchises have made the transition from 2D to 3D over the years, but they have been more gradual processes, so it’s good to see that at least in this respect, OMG: BG hasn’t lost its charm. Executing combos is somewhat different in OMF: BG to other fighters too. Rather than having a predefined combo system, the game instead allows the player to string together virtually any combination of attacks they like into combos and is very free form. This creates a huge amount of possibilities for combo attacks, and you’ll soon learn what the most effective ones are. Bashing other robots with combos is indeed cool, and as you do, you’ll build up a power meter (which can also be built up by collecting orbs that are scattered around the various arenas), and when you have enough power built up, you can unleash your robot’s devastating super attacks. It’s quite satisfying to throw a huge giant fireball across the arena and see a whole stack of other players helplessly get nailed by it, or to unleash a swarm of exploding spiders onto your victims. To add to the carnage, certain battle arenas contain weapons like small nuclear strikes that you can pick up and use on your unsuspecting opponents, and some arenas present physical obstacles like lasers that can also be used to your advantage if you play your cards right.

As far as the actual playing experience goes, it varies. While the game’s minimum specifications are not that high, if you want to run the game at more than a snail’s pace and have all the graphical effects turned on so the game looks good, you’ll need quite a killer PC. While the game didn’t have any trouble at all running on my system on the default settings, it did start noticeably dropping in framerate as more graphical effects were turned on, or the resolution was significantly increased or more players entered the fight, or combinations of the three. So if you want to really enjoy it, you should be looking at a system that is at least as powerful as the test system described at the top of this review. As was previously mentioned, there are 50 pilots in total that can be unlocked through stalwart playing through the single player component, and while this does provide some incentive to do it, the actual single player mode is a big disappointment. It isn’t at all challenging once you become adapted to the control scheme, as the Artificial Intelligence really doesn’t reflect the true meaning of that phrase. Even on the most difficult setting, it isn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer, falling for the same tricks repeatedly. To be fair, the difficulty level does increase as you progress through, but this is because of a higher number of bots, not because the said bots are getting any smarter. There’s also absolutely no in-game story to speak of to make it more interesting either, just some random trash-talking by your computer opponents before each match. Yes, OMF: BG has a back story, but it doesn’t progress at all as you are playing. The single player mode isn’t helped by the fact that there are constant crashes to the desktop with no error message to indicate what went wrong (which strangely enough doesn’t occur as often in multiplayer as it does in single player), as well as a stack of other bugs that have smaller, less significant effects, but enough to be noticeable (like somehow acquiring a trophy that you haven’t competed for).

The game’s obvious attractiveness is in its multiplayer, and after all (let’s admit), the single player modes in any fighting game can only entertain for so long. OMF: BG has canned the traditional 1-on-1 battles and gone all out to support up to 16 simultaneous players. While this is an excellent idea in theory, in practice, it’s another matter. Unfortunately the game does suffer from some severe lag, not so much over a LAN, but over the Internet, it’s very annoying. Fighting games are one particular type of game where the network code needs to be spot on because you can’t afford even a fraction of a second of lag, but unfortunately, OMF: BG does lag quite badly if the number of players exceeds 5 or 6, even if everyone is on broadband connections. You can almost forget about using dialup too…if you don’t annoy yourself, you’ll be annoying everyone else in the game. I’ll be quick to point out that this problem is not entirely the fault of the developers, as only so much can be done with the current technology. When you look at other real-time online games that support a large amount of players however (FPS’s like Counterstrike, Quake 3 and Unreal Tournament are good examples), you’ll see they lag far less, and the basic concept of those games isn’t very different from this as far as network play is concerned. It’s quite disorienting at best and extremely frustrating to the point of being unplayable at worst when you are trying to hit someone who disappears right in front of you and reappears behind you.

That aside, if you can find a bunch of online friends with fast connections, One Must Fall: Battlegrounds really shines in multiplayer, and it’s pretty obvious Diversions wanted this to be the game’s main drawcard. Beating the crud out of your friends is incredibly fun, although you may not think so straight away. OMF: BG is really a case of “don’t judge a book by its cover”. It may not seem particularly interesting at first, but once you start playing it, especially with a bunch of other people, you’ll find that it can even be a little addictive. The game is easy to pick up, and it also won’t take you very long to start pulling off some pretty tricky manoeuvres and combos thanks to the rather simple gameplay mechanics. That’s a good thing too, because if you are a novice you’ll find you get pummelled very quickly by more experienced players. Thanks to the somewhat narrow learning curve, it shouldn’t take you long to start dishing it out as good as you are receiving it. If there was actually a more vast selection of robots to choose from, this could have also been even more fun, but the eight robots you can use are different all in their own way (even though they all have a very limited moveset) and so you’ll probably want to invest some time to work out which one best suits your playing style, from the fast and nimble Jaguar to the slower and stronger Warlord. To the game’s credit the robots are all pretty well balanced as a whole so you’ll have an equal chance of winning if you know your robot as well as your opponent knows theirs. A small disappointment is that there are only two gameplay modes, Last Man Standing (self explanatory) and Demolition (points are awarded when you inflict or avoid damage and the player with the highest number of points after a preset round time wins). There are also team versions of these two modes but that doesn’t really add that extra bit of energy into the game. Luckily, the existing modes are quite fun and will keep you entertained for a while, but if you get tired of them and you want a cool change (sort of like Capture the Flag makes a good change from Deathmatch in many FPS’s), unfortunately you won’t find one here.

The game’s graphics, like the gameplay, is a bit of a hit and miss affair. The robots themselves generally look quite good, with realistic reflections and proper bump mapped textures to give them a truly inorganic look. The robot’s animations on the other hand do leave something to be desired. Each has a very generic walking animation, some don’t even possess running animations (having a “floating” animation instead) and a lot of the punching and kicking looks quite slow and awkward. The arenas as a whole are modelled beautifully and extend quite a distance, however the aforementioned pickups and obstacles scattered around the battle area do look very generic, mostly consisting of simple see-through holograms. Add to this the fact on lower end machines you’ll need to turn off many of the graphical effects to run the game decently and it really is a 50-50 split. On a good machine though, with all the graphics turned on, it does look very good. Although not to the quality of other recent PC titles, the graphics in OMF: BG do suit the game very well. The game also somehow doesn’t seem to give a true indication of the scale of these giant robots you are supposed to be controlling. As you are playing, it doesn’t feel like you are in the cockpit of a gigantic robot at all, it feels more like you are playing with a small model of the robots instead. It looks great, yes, but where is the feeling that you have control of this huge, super powerful fighting machine? Surely something could have been done to show people just how big these giant robots are.

The sound department really falls below par. Both the sound effects and music are mediocre at best, with the sound effects really only consisting of a generic metallic “clunk” at the robots hit each other. While it does sound like metal hitting metal, there are so many different sounds they could have thrown in to indicate attack speed or attack power. Effects of different types of metal…solid metal, hollow metal, thick metal…something…ANYTHING. Nope…just a generic “clunk”, no matter how strong your attack is, or whether you punched or kicked. You’ll also hear the occasional special effect like an explosion, a warped sound or an odd voiceover, but it’s nothing spectacular. The music isn’t really inspiring either (the main menu music has almost been taken directly from OMF: 2097) and there’s only a handful of different tunes you’ll hear in-game, most of which are pretty repetitive and simply sound like enhanced MIDI, and in this day and age, that doesn’t really cut it. On the plus side of the music, the style definitely suits the game and gets you into it, but it just lacks that extra impact to get your adrenaline pumping.

The replay value definitely comes from the multiplayer component, as the single player is hardly worth it. Get onto a good server and you’ll find that you can spend many hours happily robot bashing everyone in the arena, provided everyone has a good connection and there isn’t too many people in the game. The concept of the maximum of 16 online players is great, but that’s all it is, a great concept. Current technology limitations and buggy network code prevent it from being much more than that. More multiplayer game modes and a higher number of robots to choose from would have been nice too. The big disappointment is that the game still possesses a plethora of bugs, everything from the buggy network code to random crashes to desktop. The game does come with an in-built auto patcher that will automatically download new patches and install them (provided you are connected to the Internet of course), and already the game has had a number of large patches that fix things here and there, but that doesn’t change the fact that the game really didn’t receive the polish it needed before release. Diversions make no excuses for this though, other than the fact that they needed to get the game out and pay their bills, but it does leave you wondering what the game COULD have been had it had more time dedicated to it before it hit the shelves. For the dedicated fans, waiting it out for the new patches that address the bugs and other gameplay issues may be rewarding, for the average gamer, it may just become too frustrating to the point where the game isn’t touched again.

One Must Fall Battlegrounds generally looks good and plays well enough, but bad sound, inexcusable bugs and crashes, a small number of playmodes and disappointing gameplay variety really ruins the overall experience. It could have been so much more, and it could have been the benchmark standard set for years to come when it came to not just PC fighting games, but multiplayer PC games in general. Unfortunately, it’s not, and if anything, Diversions need to be given credit for even trying to create a game of this magnitude. Perhaps with more time, it would have been THE game to own. In its current form, PC gamers will probably want to avoid it, at least until patches are released that address the really bad areas. Console gamers, this game won’t convert you into a PC gamer. Hear me out: It is not a particularly bad game by any means, but it’s not particularly good either. Ultimately, it’s a game that really only the One Must Fall cult following can really appreciate and enjoy.

How the game scores (out of 10)

Graphics: 7

The robots and battle arenas are all nicely detailed, but generic animations and special effects, and a lack of scale let it down. Your PC specs also need to be quite high to see it all in its full glory.

Sound: 4

The musical score suits the game, but that’s about the only positive thing that can be said about the sound. Repetitive music that doesn’t have a huge variety and awful, uninspiring sound effects plague the game.

Gameplay: 7

I wanted to score this higher, I really did, but the bugs, bad single player and lack of a large variety of play modes is the reason for the average score. The game itself plays quite well and is fun when everything is working the way it’s supposed to and there’s no lag, which is its redeeming feature and the reason it was scored even this highly.

Lastability: 6

Forget about the single player, the game’s focus is obviously on the multiplayer and at the basic level, it works. However, if they wanted this game to be focused mainly on multiplayer, they needed to add more multiplayer modes at the very least, and perhaps a larger variety of selectable robots to spice up the variety. Some cool unlockable bonuses would have been nice too.

Overall (not an average): 6

One Must Fall: Battlegrounds could have been it. It could have been the PC game and fighting game that caused everyone to sit up and take notice. Believe me, I honestly wanted to score this game much higher. The end product however is a game that is enjoyable enough when everything works, but is laced with bugs and lacks the ultimate polish games need these days and unfortunately I can not justify giving it a better score. With enough time and enough patches, it could become very good, but by then gamers would more than likely have moved on. But it’s not all doom and gloom. If this is any indication of what’s to come, One Must Fall fans, and indeed fighting game fans as a whole should be very excited about the future.

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