Gameplay

When will the hurting stop?

Gore’s weapons are terrible. I won’t go into each one in detail, so let’s take the Flamethrower for an example. I don’t know how often this happens in real life, but you catch yourself on fire way too easily in Gore. Simply running towards someone while shooting the flamethrower is enough to catch yourself ablaze. What’s the point in using the weapon if you’re just going to kill yourself in the process? Every weapon in Gore is like this – you’re constantly asking yourself why you’re using it, but then realize there’s no better alternative.

The character classes in Gore really don’t work. In games like Team Fortress classes have specific weapons and abilities, whereas in Gore the only differences are the speed and starting weapons. This means that every class can pick up the same weapon and amount of armor as the rest. This doesn’t work because the fast classes will always dominate a game. If you can pick up the same heavy weapons and armor, but run faster, why would you pick a slower class? There is a robot class that is slightly different, but not different enough to justify choosing it.

Armor flying off

Meet Mr. Chainsaw

Uzis

The stamina meter determines how fast you can run. It’s affected by how heavy your current weapon is, how long you’ve been running, and how much damage you’ve received. A stamina meter isn’t new; mods like Day of Defeat for Half-Life have been using it for a while. Usually the stamina meter is used to give a sense of realism to the game. This makes sense in DoD since it is supposed to be a realistic World War II mod. Gore on the other hand has nothing to do with any realism, so I don’t see the purpose of a stamina meter. It also doesn’t help that Gore’s stamina meter is poorly implemented. The biggest problem is that your stamina goes down when you take damage. Low stamina means slow movement, which means you’re a sitting duck. While this would make sense in a “realistic” FPS, in a fast shooter like Gore it’s just dumb. Imagine playing a fast Deathmatch like Quake 3 (or even UT) where you slowed down every time you took damage – not very fun, is it?

Single and Multiplayer

The single player game is a waste of the 4 hours it takes to complete. The levels are straight out of a bad Quake 1 mod. The “scripting” involves enemies appearing in front of you when you walk into a room. The game even proves itself idiotic by saying there are “insane amounts of enemies nearby”, when there are only 15. Gore can’t even do the old “grab the key to open the door to the next level” formula since it can’t handle doors. Every level is literally point A to point B, with killing enemies if you feel like it.

A cozy fire

OptikNerv, how original

Very little blood

Multiplayer Gore is a step backward in FPS games. There’s nothing we haven’t seen before, but that isn’t the problem. When you combine the bad weapon and the poorly implemented stamina, multiplayer Gore isn’t fun. I was constantly frustrated between waiting for weapons to switch, constantly running out of ammo, needing to pick up three different types of armor, killing myself on exploding weapons – I could continue this list indefinitely. I almost like the fast speed, but it only lasts for a few seconds until your character tires out. The only way to alleviate this is to constantly pick up stamina boosters to keep up the pace. I felt like Pac-Man running around picking up power-pellets.