The Chinese blogosphere is abuzz with excitement over a demo for a new single player first-person shooter. That’s right, there is a lot of buzz for a demo. So what exactly makes this demo so exciting for Chinese players? It’s a domestically made FPS, done by a one man studio over the course of one summer.
The demo, the first few levels of the game, WarStorm, was released last week, and news about it hit the front pages of Chinese gaming sites such as Sina and netEase. Immediately, Chinese gamers and websites started out on a quest to find out where the game comes from and who’s behind it. The only clue that was given was that on the lower right hand corner of the loading screen, it says “created domestically by ‘Fei Yan Islands Studios’ a one man team” and that it was made with Unreal Engine 3.
Very little is known about Fey Yan Islands Studios, but rumours have it that the creator is only a university student. WarStorm isn’t a Call of Duty or a Battlefield, but it’s still pretty damn impressive-looking — it’s even got loads of destructible objects. From all reviews, the game plays like every other PC FPS; in fact, plot-wise, it’s also very similar to modern day shooters such as CoD.
One thing that baffled me and that may have been answered by Chinese gamers, is that the spoken dialogue in-game was all in English. I’m not sure where the voice clips came from or why the characters all spoke English, but I suspect it may have to do with the “anti-terrorism” plot.
The only downside apart from the bugs (since it’s a demo) is that the AI is incredibly dumb. According to one video reviewer, the AI just stands there and shoots when it sees the player. It doesn’t even move to avoid being shot at.
The free demo is available at the source link, though it requires some knowledge of Chinese to download.
Leave a Reply