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Developer: Abnormal Software
Publisher: Abnormal Software
Format: PC
The first thing that grabbed my attention with CounterSpell was the art, which so sum up perfectly, it's what I imagine Arzea would look like in 3D. This is an early alpha game, but is one with a lot of potential. It's an FPS that uses a class-based system in a fantasy setting. It's 3D with voxel aesthetics, and is actually really complex. While I will still point out the good parts of the game (at the beginning at this review/first look at), I want to focus a bit more on the flaws (in the latter half of the review/first look at), just to help it become better as a game.
Now there are four classes here: The Mage, the Rouge, the Priest, and the Warrior. All of them have their ups, downs, and special abilities. The Mage and the Priest are the long ranged classes, with the Rouge and Warrior being the shorter ranged ones. They all have a basic attack and a secondary attack. The Mage and Priest shoot basic magic, while the Warrior and Rouge both do basic melee attacks(warrior: slow and strong:: Rouge: fast and weaker). The secondary attack for the Mage is a straight-up grenade, while the Priest has his healing shot. The Rouge and Warrior both shoot arrows as their secondary, which works like the Mage and Priest's basic magic shots but with a slower rate of fire. Other than that they all have some different abilities with cool-down effects, but are usually really helpful.
One thing I would like to note is the beauty of the aesthetics in this alpha. All the sprites, models, and board pieces are really nice looking. Although it's a bit dark mostly, it fits pretty well with the atmosphere, I'm not gonna lie there. The only thing that was a little under-par when compared with the rest of the game is the melee attacks for the Warrior and Rouge. They're extremely simple and really bland, not making it too exciting or fun to look at, which you will a lot when playing the two classes.
Now let me talk about a few things that I felt could've been worked on a bit more, or something it could really change.
Some of the key placements take a bit of getting used to, gonna be honest. This is one of those games that never really tells you how you're supposed to play, so it might take a lot of button pressing to figure out what everything does and how it works. The sensitivity is a bit too high for me, which led to the problem of there being no way of tweaking that.
A big problem is the difficulty in this game. It's obviously designed as a multiplayer game, as it's a lot more fun when you don't have to take on a whole bunch of the monsters by yourself. It can be extremely hard to deal with at first, especially when simultaneously dealing with the fore-mentioned problems.
Another thing that can really have a huge negative impact on the game as a whole is it's music, or rather the lack of music. There's nothing. The sound bits are basic, making the repetition not so bad, but the lack of any other background noise is deafening. The art does well to help with creating an atmosphere, but a major part of creating atmosphere is the music. It's simply awkward to play the game and hear almost nothing. It makes it feel incomplete(which it is, being an alpha, but still), which is bad.
Overall, it's fun to play, especially when you can grab some buddies. It's a neat FPS with it's class-based system and RPG elements here and there. I'd suggest giving it a play, and more importantly a bit of support.
