Warmonger: Operation Downtown Destruction: IMBACORE Thursday 18 March 2010

Back in 2002, a company named Ageia surfaced, bringing into the PC industry avant-garde hardware designed to offload physics calculations from the CPU. The hardware, a dedicated physics card (much like a separate sound card, only this one calculated physics, not audio) didn’t do so well, considering that enhanced physics didn’t produce game altering changes back in the early part of the decade. In 2008, Nvidia acquired Ageia, fusing the innovative physics technology with their video cards. Ageia might not have survived the decade, but their legacy, the hardware and the middleware PhysX, continues to live on in several games.

One of these is Warmonger: Downtown Destruction, a game developed by NetDevil. Now released as a downloadable free PC FPS game, Warmonger was made to fully integrate physics-related gimmicks into its multiplayer-centric gameplay. I couldn’t find any information on how Warmonger found its way into Nvidia’s downloadable Graphics Plus Power Packs but the free PC FPS multiplayer shooter now acts as the flagship of the bunch of freebies, giving players the whole nine yards of what it feels like to have a physics-intensive game.

Being a PhysX-centric game, when it comes to physics effects, Warmonger delivers in spades. The game is riddled with elements that flagrantly announce it to be a PhysX game. You turn a corner, a banner blocks your way, undulating and flapping in the breeze. You brush it aside and find yourself in an open area, cinders floating past you in a realistic manner as you run towards the sound of a firefight. You arrive at the scene and hastily take cover behind a concrete barrier as a hostile opens up with his chaingun. The concrete cover you ran from breaks apart in chunks. You take a bead, alt-fire, and launch a grenade. The thing sticks on the chaingunner. He runs towards you, in a desperate attempt to take you with him but blows apart several feet away, chunks of meat flying in all directions. These little things thoroughly immerse you in the urban-themed arenas of this free PC first-person shooter. Read More...

Review: Downloadable PC Free FPS Multiplayer Shooter - Full Game Warmonger: Downtown Destruction Review [IMBACORE]