Hands-on: Huxley: The Dystopia
Huxley: The Dystopia is, for this writer at least, a bit of a deadbeat dad.. Sure, it's talked some big game in the past, but unfortunately, it's never quite lived up to its words -- first promising cross-platform play between Xbox 360 and PC, then pretending it would be released before the end of time. While it's been quite some time since Joystiq last played the game, NHN America/ijji.com were on-hand at E3 to show us the Unreal Engine 3-based, now free-to-play, FPS.
We were dropped into a deathmatch with a handful of other show attendees, all of us employing impressive gaming PCs and headsets to boot. So here's the thing about Huxley -- it feels exactly like Unreal Tournament. Nearly identical, actually. In fact, back in mid-May, the game's producer admitted as much, saying, "It is more like Unreal or Quake or something like that ... much faster." Hit the jump for our full impressions.
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That being said, the environments looked great and the pacing was fast and furious. Unfortunately, what separated Huxley from the pack of UE3-based FPS games out there in the past was the game's focus on an MMO/persistent world with cross-platform play. What we saw at E3 seemed a lot more like a competent first-person shooter running on a PC we couldn't possibly afford -- and, ya know, no cross-platform play/persistent world whatsoever.
It didn't help that the selection of weapon loadouts for each of the game's classes were woefully dependent on the strongest of the bunch (though we only played the game for 20 minutes, to be fair), nor that the level we played felt downright cramped. This comes across as especially confusing to us given the game's original emphasis on an open-world and enormous battles.
It's hard to complain about the price of entry to the game though -- aside from a fawncy PC, that is -- and as such, you may want to at least give the game a shot if you have the requisite hardware. NHN America/ijji.com is still saying the game will release sometime later this year, but, like most things Huxley, we've heard promises before that went unfulfilled, so you may not want to make any high-stakes bets on that.
