Real Life Highscore

Indie developer Wolfire Games recently released their entry into the 7 Day FPS competition – Receiver. The game has some interesting new concepts to show to the FPS genre.

Receiver is a first-person shooter that explores some interesting new ideas such as non-linear storytelling, randomized level design, and realistically interactive gun mechanics. When you first start you have nothing but a handgun, a cassette player, and, if you are lucky, some magazines and ammo.

Before you can do anything you have to familiarize yourself with your weapon. Check the magazine for ammo, inspect the chamber to see if there is a round in there, and flick off the safety. A small mistake such as forgetting to pull back the hammer or failing to disengage the safety can see you shot by an auto turret or tazered by a flying sentry bot.

As you progress you find tapes that, once played in your cassette player, begin to explain the story of the strange world you are in. You find the tapes in a random order so you could discover them all in different play-throughs or in just the one – if you can stay alive for that long. This game is hard, one shot, one tazer, or a small fall will kill you causing you to restart form the beginning again. The random level design makes this difficulty rewarding instead of frustrating.

I had a lot of fun with this game and I will likely be playing it quite a lot over the next few weeks. I am even more interested in seeing some of the new ideas explored here used in other games. A shooter where you must learn every feature of any new gun you find sounds like an awesome premise – one that I hope to see very soon.

You can download Receiver over at Wolfire Games. If you have already pre-orderd Overgrowth then you get it for free!