His best toy, though - and it's possibly the best toy in the whole game - is a drill cannon that fires off chunky bore-heads which can dig instant tunnels through the environment. This isn't a picture of tunneling, mind - it's just too scary.įinally, there's the miner, with a shotgun that ensures he's useless in any kind of combat situation that isn't extremely claustrophobic, but a backup suite of gadgets that include dynamite and a super spade that takes out 3x3 chunks of the environment each time it strikes the earth. He's got a weak SMG and the ability to chuck down turrets, and - cripes - he's got a jetpack, too: a hold-space-to-boost number with a generous fuel recharge on it. Next comes the engineer, who may well be renamed by the time the game hits apparently. One step along from him you'll find the marksman: a scout with a wonderfully effective sniper rifle and dandy proximity mines - you can place them and then hide them under blocks - and a pickaxe that's a little faster than the shovel but still a bit rubbish. The commando's the former, packing heavy weaponry like rocket launchers and machine guns and grenades but relying on a relatively slow and awkward shovel as his melee/digging tool. Your access point to this shifting, surprising and yet warmly familiar landscape are a quartet of classes which scale between all-out military types who are practically useless at building, to delicate structural artists who are worryingly exposed in a gunfight. That Western town, for example, has a whole system of gold mines hidden beneath its surface - mines that you can explore, alter, fortify and expand on. You can also just use it to sculpt random fripperies, though, or to look for secrets. There's a solid tactical purpose for this kind of stuff, too, because the game, unlike Minecraft, uses gravity-based physics which means structures will fall, causing damage, if you take out their supports. Maps range from Wild West frontier towns to river temples of Ancient Egypt, and you can take them apart until there's nothing left. You can knock the environment down with your guns or digging tools, and you can use your personal inventory of blocks and prefabs - small, ready-built structures like ladders and barricades - to build it back up again. There's deathmatch and ranked play and load-outs and classes and games that scale up to 16v16, but the blocky landscape that all of this good stuff is set into is far more than a voguish aesthetic conceit. Jagex has pigeonholed Ace of Spades as a 'creative shooter', then, and what that turns out to mean is a shooter that I managed to play for about an hour or so, quite enjoyably, without actually shooting anyone at all. Maps come in a variety of sizes, and some of the biggies feel really roomy. Very little of that atmosphere is lost, it seems, when you throw in automatic weaponry. On a recent visit to the company's Cambridge offices, Jagex staff might have bristled every time Notch's modern classic came up in conversation, but the online team-based blaster they're putting together has gained a lot from Minecraft's sense of play and of possibility. Hold on, that all sounds pretty good, actually - and it plays even better than it sounds. Sure enough, watch YouTube videos of Jagex's latest project - the Keepers of Runescape picked the game up about a year ago and have been working with the original creators in-house since then - and it looks a bit like satire: those glorious Minecraft steppes and valleys are seen through the squint of iron-sights, blocks shatter under the impact of shotgun blasts, enemies tunnel into the ground to escape incoming rockets, and mountains erupt from well-placed proximity mines. Surely a major reason for Minecraft's sweeping success with so many different sorts of players is that it didn't come with guns in the first place? 'Minecraft with guns' is the elevator pitch for Ace of Spades, and the elevator pitch is a bit weird, really.
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