ShootMania: Storm

ShootMania: Storm is an online first person shooter from a French game developer Nadeo. The team is best known for Trackmania racing series, which allows for far-reaching modding. ShootMania: Storm takes the same ideas and replants them on the ground of FPS genre.

The game focuses on battles between teams of players. There are two teams available – the blue and the red one. After selecting one of them, you move to the battleground, where you are offered a variety of game modes, like the Battle Mode which focuses on capturing enemy flags. The gameplay requires careful management of two resources– weapon energy and character’s stamina. The first one is represented by a bar in the bottom-left corner of the screen. You can take only a few shots before it drops to zero, forcing you to wait for it to regenerate. As the result, accuracy becomes a crucial skill, without which you quickly end up defenseless at the mercy of an enemy. An equally important element is stamina. Characters move quickly around the map, but if necessary, they can do it even faster. You just need to hold down the correct button after jumping, and your hero speeds up like crazy. However, this tempo lasts for just a dozen meters before the entire stamina bar is exhausted, and needs a couple of seconds to recharge.

Another characteristic feature of the production is a unique weapon system. Customarily, you only have one weapon – the energy rifle. Unlike other action games, ShootMania makes it impossible to change gear on the fly. The only way to use a different type of weapon is standing on a special field, where you can, e.g. cast bolts of lightning (when moving on metal pavement) or plasma (when standing on wooden surface).

Similarly to TrackMania, the creators gave players a powerful level editor, which allows to alter existing maps in any way, create new ones, or even create entirely new game modes. Naturally, all fan-made creations can be shared with other players using Nadeo’s social platform called ManiaPlanet 2.0. The service is completely free, but some features may be purchased with virtual currency earned, e.g. for sharing mods, blogging, or even just logging into the game. At the same time there are no microtransactions. The authors did not make it possible to buy points for real money.

In terms of visuals, ShootMania: Storm does not even try to be realistic. Instead, the game is full of bright colors. That is why you should never have any problem with recognizing an enemy. Even from afar you can easily tell between an enemy and a friend. Moreover, this makes it possible to launch the game on older computers which would fail to run the latest technologies.

Last updated on August 14, 2015