Stargate Resistance - PC Game Review

 Stargate Resistance is a third person shooter set in the Stargate universe. It features six soldier classes (3 SGC and 3 System Lords) and you can only play in three maps. The maps aren’t very big, either. You have game types like team deathmatch and capture the flag which are staples of shooters, so there isn’t anything new to this game. Basically, you just pick a class and run around shooting each other. A variety of weapons does help to make things a little more interesting, but overall it’s just a run-and-gun type game that requires very little in the way of tactics or strategy.

The levels are pretty nicely designed and there are tons of hiding places and limited access areas for sniping, so there is some good potential there as far as the level designs. The problem is that the game does not run very smoothly. It’s not a graphic card issue, but mainly just clunky programming. My system can play Left 4 Dead and Crysis without a hiccup, but in this game it seems jerky.

While running through the three measly levels in this game, I was impressed by the textures. This game was made using the Unreal 3 engine, so it looks quite good in some places. Unfortunately, the character models are garbage and your own character looks like something out of a PlayStation 1 game. I’m not kidding. The whole package here looks like a game better suited for the PS2 or some system from yesteryear. By today’s standards, most people are going to be turned off by the graphics. The screenshots (see below) are very misleading because they do not depict the actual gameplay.

While playing this game, I could hear faint sound effects and music. It was like the sound effects just didn’t work right. I discovered that the game is incompatible with surround sound right now, so you will have to change your audio settings (in Windows) to stereo sound in order to hear the effects in this game. You know what? I’m not going to do that. I am not going to change a system-wide setting in order to make one game work because I’d have to go change it back for every other game I play. Forget that!

I tried to like this game. I really did. I was sympathetic to the indie software market and all that, and I understand the people behind this were just trying to get something from their efforts with the doomed Stargate MMO. I’ve read some message board comments where people talk about the economy and all that. I get it – times are tough. Cheyenne Mountain Entertainment declared bankruptcy before this game even became available to download from Steam.

However, on the other end of that argument is the consumer. I was not given a free copy of this game to review. I saw it and was so interested that I spent my own money to purchase the game. Now I can’t help but feel like I wasted twenty bucks on something that is just a scrapped-together underwhelming third person shooter. This game might have worked as a 99 cent iPhone shooter, but for a PC game it just isn’t acceptable to charge that much for so little. In many ways, this game is just a demo for what the Stargate MMO could have been.

For more information on this game, visit StargateResistance.com.

To see what many people are saying about this game, visit the Steam forums.