Offensive Combat -- A Shooter for the Crude, Cheap and Core

Fun FPS combat all in a browser.

Offensive Combat is a joke. No, really, the entire game, right down the name itself, is supposed to be funny. Generic name aside, Offensive Combat's success partially rests on the idea that it can stand out in an increasingly crowded space by forgoing the super serious or military look of other games and embrace the most childish and ridiculous aspects of online shooter communities. Like you'd expect from a shooter trying to appeal to fans of competitive shooters, it also has all the bells and whistles, with graphics on par with many Xbox Live or PlayStation Network games. In this regard it isn't really all that unique outside of its comedic factor...until you realize it's all playing straight out of a browser.

Looks pretty good, right?

After downloading a tiny Unity Engine plugin, you'll be able to immediately jump into Offensive Combat. Other free-to-play shooters like Blacklight: Retribution or Tribes: Ascend may look better, but there's still a higher barrier to entry for many people when they have to download and install a client. Developer U4iA Games wants to avoid that and make the entire experience as inviting as possible. Say, for instance, you played Offensive Combat and were into it, the idea is that you can then quickly text your buddies, have them sign up and start playing in your group within minutes.

Despite being browser based, Offensive Combat isn't going to limit you in terms of its mechanics. This isn't a social game shoehorned into a first-person perspective, but a real, competitive title created by a staff made up of shooter developers like Zipper, Zombie and Activision. Action in Offensive Combat is fast, and anyone who plays the likes of Call of Duty or Blacklight should feel right at home. Along with your main weapon, everyone gets access to a range of secondary and melee weapons, as well as grenades. How good you are matters, too, since Offensive Combat rewards skilled players more than anyone who spends money.

Of course if you do want to spend money the team at U4iA plans to give you plenty to buy. Avatars are highly customizable, and you can mix-and-match different heads, arms, legs, torsos, and gloves to create everything from serious looking soldiers to lizards with phallic looking bananas jutting from their crotch. Everything in the game outside of a few vanity items and boosts are planned to be purchasable with both in-game and actual money, and Offensive Combat will also utilize a rental system for people who want to try things out briefly.

Along with customizing your character's appearance, you can also tweak their weapons and what U4iA calls their "pwn." Killing an enemy nets you experience to level up your account, and earning levels grants you access to purchase new tiers of weapons and other unlockables, as well as new perks (which are earned solely through leveling up). If you manage to take someone down and it looks relatively safe, you can walk up to their corpse before the timer counts down and hit the G key, initiating a pwn. Pwns are basically taunts, though U4iA's put a large number of them in, and each one comes with a custom animation. Thus you might manage to take someone down with a well-placed headshot and then run over and fart on their face, dance on their grave, or even just rock out. Doing a pwn presents a risk / reward situation, since each takes a few seconds to complete and if someone interrupts you there's no bonus.

The most controversial design decision U4iA's made with Offensive Combat comes in the way they handle rewards for kills. You always get the experience you earn, but since each enemy drops in-game currency or other items upon death, you have to go and pick up the reward before someone else does. This makes sniping and camping less valuable, something I think is smart, but I'm not so sure how people will react to having others take something they might feel they've earned. Still, it could be worth the frustration because it can create dynamic focal points on the battlefield, where everyone is hustling to a particular choke point or landmark to try and score fat loot.

Closed beta starts soon, with a full release coming before the end of the year. Prior to release they also plan on putting in controller support, as well as integrating iOS into the Offensive Combat experience -- though not at all how I expected. Since the Unity Engine works across iOS and PC, I expected them to make some sort of port of Offensive Combat. Instead, they're trying to make the mobile version an accompaniment to the PC version, enabling players to do things like use their phone to call in airstrikes for PC players. Details are scarce, but we're supposed to hear more on that in the coming months.

Full on banana suits.

Offensive Combat's ridiculous take on character appearance and the pwn animations help it stand out, but the real reason it could succeed is how simple it is to get started. When all you need is a browser to hop in, you have a ginormous potential audience. The real question, then, is will Offensive Combat's low barrier to entry and quirky premise earn it the cash U4iA needs, or will it get pwned by its higher fidelity competition?