Synopsis

Arctic Combat is a free-to-play strategy first-person shooter developed and published by Webzen. In the near future, discovery of oil and natural gas within the Arctic Circle results in World War III. The United States and Russia, the two strongest countries in the world at this time, begin to attack aggressively to stake their claim in the possession of these new-found resources.

Players will engage in combat in a variety of environments, from the brutal cold of the Arctic Circle to the blazing heat of the Middle East. Game features include drops from players, an in-game auction system, quest-like missions, as well as a variety of game modes. Confirmed game modes include Team Death Match, Free for all, Demolition, Conquest, Search and Destroy, and PVE,

Graphics

Arctic combat's looks are about what you would expect from any FTP FPS. Decent. Not amazing. Yet not bad. Luckily, this is something that I agree with from this game. If Webzen had attempted to for example, create the game with the Frostbite engine, there wouldn't be nearly as many players. A FTP (Free to play) First person shooter on Steam, with low system requirements? That's a good time. This is why you will find a decent amount of players on it's servers. On topic, the game delivers most of the time. At some points, I see not very amazing weapons textures, some ugly visuals resulting from explosions. And other small bugs. My PC can handle it on Max settings, but people on lower visuals, such as low-medium, may not enjoy the experience as much because of this.

Controls

Arctic Combat has controls similar to most FPS you will find on the PC. WASD keys to move, right and left mouse buttons to fire. The tutorial for some reason advertises that AC has different controls from most FPS. One example though is that the grenade selection key is '4'. This is sometimes annoying, but can be easily switched Via the menus. One pet peeve is that I couldn't find a 'Toggle Crouch' option. I hate hold to crouch in all games, and to my dismay, AC didn't offer a toggle crouch. I don't know about others, but to me this is very annoying, and can actually mess me up in dire situations.

Innovation

The area where most FPS will fall flat. Unluckily, AC falls victim to the never ending 'Call of Duty Style FPS' cycle. It is almost, (without the name and popularity) a Call of duty recreation to the point. Best part? It's a free call of duty recreation. The controls, gameflow, and style is almost a perfect recreation of a CoD title. One innovation though is the health system. In AC, you do not regen health over time. You can only heal by picking up "Health Packs" dropped at player death points. I enjoy this simply because it isn't every day that we see this implemented into a FPS. It cuts down on camping for one. So points for that.

Online Play

Online play. This what a FPS is all about! Featuring a somewhat simple creating and joining a game menu, I can normally find a game to play at most times when I'm on. So this makes it easy for me to pick up and play on my Laptop when I'm downstairs before school, or can't get to my desktop. The only problem, is that most games will be full, or only have 1 to 2 players. The fix? Bots. If you ever can't find a game, or just aren't very good at the game (I'll talk about that later) you can make a custom match with just you and 11 bots. Put it on very easy, and you have an amazingly easy good time! Also, this game is fantastically easy. I'm not the best FPS player for PC, not at all, but I find myself excelling at AC. It may be the players, the connection, I don't know. And for some reason, if I ever go 2-20 on Black Ops for PC, I can always open AC and go 25-8 online. So it is great for players looking for an easy FPS. The downfall of this is, hackers. Almost all FPS for the PC experience hacking players from time to time. I once joined a game where the player was invisible. Could only see his name. Hopefully, most of you should be able to see how that's unfair. On a positive note, it seems that Webzen is attempting to fix this, their hearts may just be in the wrong place. I was recently account banned (Webzen account, not Steam Thank god) because I was in a game with that invisible hacker. I only hope that Webzen gets on track soon.

Final Verdict

AC looks promising. While it is a copy cat of many CoD features, it has some that may very well be ones we see in every FPS next year. While it's a game that I enjoy, it's not for everyone. If you own Battlefield 3 for example, I recommend playing it. However, for those of you with some free time, and 3GB on your HDD for a new title, download this. You'll be happy that you did.