UberSoldier Preview

It isn't very often that a PC first person shooter arrives on my desk that I know very little about, even the bad ones I've usually seen somewhere before. Bar a few screenshots in December and January, UberSolider was pretty much a mystery when this preview disk arrived earlier this week. Granted, the shots that have been released do look pretty good but for some reason I didn't take much notice. Maybe that's because it's another World War II game, who can tell.

Anyway, UberSoldier focuses on the attempts of Nazi scientists to create a super solder by reviving fallen soldiers in the hope they will retain some supernatural abilities from the afterlife, it would seem that for the sake of this story that they succeeded as you play once such 'UberSolider'. Karl Stolz was a German officer killed by partisans in his former life. Unfortunately for his former Nazi masters he has retained the memories of what they have done to him and is mighty pissed at losing his chance for eternal peace and therefore hell bent on eradicating the Nazi's.

Usually with a shooter like this you have a good idea of what engine a game uses and therefore have a clue what it will look like. UberSoldier doesn't look very much like anything else, it has very highly detailed textures and lot's of modern shader effects; smoke, fire, heat haze and your temporal shield in particular look great. It runs well too, it clearly has a decent underlying engine.

Let's get the geeky stuff out of the way first then, physics are becoming a requirement in PC games these days and UberSoldier isn't deficient in this respect either, blow a hole in a gas cannister and it will whizz about spewing out gas until it goes bang, blow one up in a pile of boxes an the boxes fly all over the room, you know the story and it's all good fun. We do unfortunately see the return of that most overused prop, the exploding barrel, at least the fire looks pretty.

What increasingly separates the men from the boys in this gaming arena is character skinning and animation as well as A. I., the Enemy player models in UberSolider and very good, so are their skins but for me they don't quite move in a truly believable fashion, they are ok though and were not enough to put me off. A. I. is a slightly different matter, we didn't get to see much, if any, in this small demo. I hope that the bad guys are a little more 'Intelligent' in the final product because that surely does help the gameplay experience a lot. We do see a couple of scripted sequences that work quite well though.

Burut have thrown a couple of slightly different gameplay elements in to spice things up a little, your temporal shield is one advantage of being a supernatural being, it charges by killing bad guys with head shots, get 3 head shot kills in a row and it will activate enveloping you in a transparent blue energy shield that is more or less impervious to bullets, this allows you to run right up to bad guys and slash them with your knife, get 3 knife kills in a row and you'll get a health boost. You can of course just carry on shooting things with your authentic looking WWII German guns if you want, they actually feel pretty good and have decent recoil. Overall I'm quite impressed.

UberSoldier would seem to be a pretty decent and good looking little shooter that really only lacks a highly sophisticated enemy A. I., that could be considered quite a harsh judgement considering I've only played a small demo but they don't seem to do much more than shoot at you or lob an occasional grenade. Quite why some of them appear to have American accents I don't know either but that can change in short order no doubt, as could many things in the remaninig 2 months before release.

Our purchase recommendation will very much depend on price and whether or not the game will ship with multiplayer content. Either way will we will hopefully see a demo before the end of March, and that you should absolutely try, I liked playing UberSoldier, I'm sure lots of you guys will too.

There are more screenshots in our UberSoldier gallery