Neat ideas and a good presentation fall apart due to goofy design
CellFactor is an arena-based first person shooter that is, quite frankly, a barebones copycat of old-school heavyweights Quake and Unreal. Now don’t get me wrong, I love this genre, and it’s a shame that these types of games can’t stand on the same stage as Halo and Call of Duty.
Putting out a multiplayer-focused FPS on XBLA seems like a weird, yet interesting move. Unfortunately, CellFactor is a mediocre game that probably won’t lure anyone away from his or her multiplayer shooter of choice, let alone provide a neat distraction.
Before jumping in a game, you’ll choose from three character classes: the psi-powered Bioshop, with the ability to throw junk and fly, the dual-wielding Guardian, and the well-rounded teleporting Black-Ops. Each class having abilities throw an interesting ShadowRun-like twist into the formula, but after spending sometime with the game you’ll quickly realize the powers are mere gimmicks, and your energy regenerates so slowly it’s hard to even fight in rhythm of the games frantic pace. The game just works better when all players go guns blazing, and forget about any “psi-abilities”.
The singleplayer quite possibly contains the most horribly designed challenges I’ve experienced in recent memory. There are three campaigns (one for each class), all with ten missions that primarily serves as a multiplayer tutorial. Typical missions will be “win the match with only 5 respawns”, or “don’t lose a single round in the match”. Sometimes it’ll ask you to do things that are both weird, and almost impossible considering you’re allies are mere bots. One time I had to capture a flag by myself, without the enemy team even touching my own. How am I supposed to trust my bots to guard my flag? “Become the Arena Master twice” …ok, what exactly does that mean? One time I had to stun an enemy, which I didn’t know how to do. What would seem obvious to most gamers, I checked the options menu, which told me to use the “Y”, which totally didn’t work. Thankfully someone on Xbox Live figured it out and told me I had to collect a certain item in order to execute the stun move.
CellFactor disappoints me. It’s not often we get these kinds of games, and the game fails because of easily fixable problems. If they striped away psi powers, in favor of traditional character classes, and perhaps make the weapons effects more vibrant I could easily recommend this game. It makes a good impression with fantastic visuals that are on-par with UT 2004, and has some neat ideas but nothing ever comes together nicely and only leaves behind a messy first person shooter.