Once upon a time there was a company that no-one could even pronounce properly named Jagex. Jagex were well known for their MMO RuneScape in which you create yourself in a digital world filled with medieval & mythical creatures whilst trying to avoid the 9 year olds that populate it. RuneScape was essentially the poor man's World of Warcraft with its misleading CGI trailers, shitty fanbase and overloaded servers. So looks like Jagex have some arse kissing to do to get in people good books, enter Ace of Spades, a free to play MMO which is a mix up of TF2 and Minecraft...well it was until Jagex got their grubby little hands on it.
When you buy an indie IP to turn it into a full game that people have to buy you generally try to make it appeal to a wider audience and make it bigger. Now whilst the Jagex version of Ace of Spades does this it lacks one fundamental thing, the original game.
In the original F2P title you played as a soldier on the red or green team in what looked like WWI towns depicted in a 8-bit blocky style. You had no class and all had the same weapons but how you chose to play dictated what class you were, for instance if you ran in head first guns blazing you were a rifleman, if you stayed back and picked off enemies from a distance you were a sniper and if you got out your spade and dug through the map to the objective you were a miner. Each had a pivotal part to play and gave a very shallow alpha stage indie game depth and a lifespan. However in the Jagex version you have 4 preset classes to choose from each with defining playstles to them, a miner who is best suited to mining, a sniper who has a sniper as a primary weapon, a soldier who has a rocket launcher and a twat on a jetpack that is the only good class in the game because its so fucking easy to kill people with.
Lets move away from the negatives as much as possible and look at the whole creation aspect to the game. Now due t it being set in a 8-bit Minecraft esque area you have the ability to build and mine blocks to defend yourself or use to flank enemies. This is a very unique aspect to make the game stand out and is quite fun. Ok now the negatives again, the maps are so fucking large and usually set on 2 or 3 different islands with caverns or rivers splitting them that it makes mining useless, not to mention the outrageous time it takes to mine a tunnel unless you are a miner and even then it takes a while. You may as well just use the shithead jetpack guy, fly over to the other base and riddle them with SMG bullets. The environment is perhaps the most destructible in an FPS game ever, with the ability to destroy every single block on the map gives you an ever changing landscape, however it never bloody does because everyone is using the jetpack and fighting in the air. I have a funny feeling that it may be down to one thing making this game so bad don’t you?
The art style is perhaps the only thing I cannot find fault with. The blocks are well...cubic as you would expect. The colour pallette varies depending on map and at the start of a game looks quite beautiful. But wait there is something to complain about! The game is textureless, everything is just 1 texture and different colours making the game look as bland as it plays. Yes at a distance everything looks nice but once you get a bit closer and it is just all one solid textureless texture it loses its sheen. The crosshairs are also square making it fucking impossible to hit anything, unless you're the jetpacker that is. The game does feature ironsights however they are worse than Fallout: New Vegas' ones and I didn’t think it could get worse.
The game will perform well on any PC that can turn on and off due to the lack of things it needs to load. Though maps can be rather large you need not worry unless you get into a server with a bad ping rating. However if for some reason you cant have your draw distance up to full then don’t bother playing as anyone that has a PC made in the last 10 years will be able to see you from the other side of the map and pop you in 1 shot, either with the sniper or the fucking jetpack guy.
The game did recently have a patch to fix a compatibility error with 64-bit systems of which I encountered, however it took two months of nagging the customer services and demanding refunds until they bothered to do anything about it, so yeah worst customer service ever.
The thing is Ace of Spades isn’t a bad game. It could be brilliant, one of the best Class based multiplayer shooters out there, no TF2 of course but a damn good contender at that. However it is hampered by stupid little things that can be easily fixed if Jagex bothered to get off their fat arses to do something about it. Firstly ditch the jetpack, it ruins the flow of gameplay and is the main contributor the the game being so shit. Secondly, textures, or should I say put some in the damn thing. Third, make it F2P with microtransactions for more weapons and character personalisation instead of having the outrageous £6 price tag for a game that clearly isn’t finished yet.
You may notice how this review is stupidly short and lacking any depth, I suppose that about matches Ace of Spades then. If you are unfortunate enough to have already bought the game before reading this you may as well play it due to the game saving 'CTF Classic' gamemode which is essentially the original F2P game, however if you haven’t bought the game yet and like the idea of it, wait for a few months, a year or two maybe and then get it once its hopefully been updated to make the game worth it. Besides that Ace of Spades is a game that had great promise but was picked up by a lazy developer who couldn’t even be bothered to finish it before release, another one for the 9 year olds I'm afraid.
Ace of Spades: 1/10
The only saving grace is CTF Classic
