Free Software FPS Games Compared

An anonymous reader writes "Linux-gamers.net has posted a thorough, although harsh, comparison of free software shooters. It compares seven open source shooter games in a lengthy discussion. Few have gone to the trouble of comparing and carefully examining the genre before. The author ranks the games in the following order (best to worst): Warsow, Tremulous, World of Padman, Nexuiz, Alien Arena, OpenArena, and Sauerbraten. In making these choices, it claims to use gameplay, design, innovation and presentation as criteria and includes a short history of free software shooters in the introduction."

Comments

Tremulous second best? Hate to see the rest

[sahonen]

I played Tremulous briefly a while back... The game balance is absolutely terrible. The alien team is clearly far more powerful than the human team, especially at higher levels of evolution (the most powerful alien can do devastating hit-and-run attacks that kill even the most powerful humans and doesn't give a team of even coordinated humans enough time to kill it), and the evolution model itself suffers from a problem going back to what I consider the single worst piece of game design ever, Counter-Strike. Namely, the catch-22 that forms if one team dominates early in the game. The winning team manages to acquire powerful upgrades, and the losing team cannot build up enough resources to purchase upgrades themselves. If a member of the losing team somehow manages to acquire an upgrade, it is quickly lost because he dies at the hands of the vastly more powerful enemy team, which manages to hold onto their upgrades by virtue of being unkillable while in possession of their powerful upgrades.

Warsow has very good balance being a deathmatch game, and I love the fact that there are no clearly dominant weapons in the game (I consider one-hit kills to be the epitome of bad and lazy game design), but the resulting game requires so much skill to play and I don't have enough spare time to get good enough where playing it would be enjoyable.

Team Fortress 2 is the best multiplayer game I have ever played, despite balance problems introduced by sniper headshots and the spy backstab.