A weekend with Unit

I've decided to spend a little more time with Unit. I may do more of this in the future as time permits and games are sufficiently interesting. Initially I wrote Unit off due to the cheesy graphics on the site. However, the English option gave me pause and I played it a bit more. I have now played the game about 20 hours or so. Not a lot for a first person shooter, but more than I'd put into some passing games that I put up here.

After 20 hours, I can say that Unit starts to grow on you. Well probably before that point. I often found myself thinking, "okay, this is the last round and then I'm turning it off." When I do finally turn it off, I realize I had thought that an hour before. This game is still in beta and I did experience some technical issues while I was playing.

As I mentioned before, the sound has some hissing/skipping/something weird going on. There isn't much you can do with the sound settings so I wasn't really able to play with them a whole lot. Also a few times a game has counted down to start and then instead of loading, it pops up a message saying "Please try again later". I immediately push join and it counts down again and joins the game which has already started. Also, I once played a round where we played for about 30 seconds it suddenly said "Game over, you win!" but there were no stats like we'd normally see and we were kicked back to the room. Everyone seemed very confused. Other than that there were no other clear cut technical issues.

There was an issue I found with a couple players. I don't think it was technical, I'm sure they were hacking. If you watch this video you can see towards the middle.


The guy takes a full clip to the face which bends him over backwards and he keeps running then shoots me through a wall from 40 feet off with a shot gun. He was doing that for a couple games. When I finally got host, I banned him. Screen name was "Ryuk" and belong to a clan who call themselves only "A". That was a couple days ago. Today I encountered him again with a clan buddy. They both seemed capable of taking far more damage than anyone else on the map. They still died, but slowly.

This map you see in this video is a Mercenary Free For All. These maps are fun for a few minutes, especially if you get a defensible position. However, they quickly turn into an episode of loony tunes. People can spawn almost anywhere and get a 3 second invulnerability when they do. You constantly have this situation where one person dies, someone spawns and kills his killer and someone else shows up and wastes him and then someone else spawns, and it goes on and on. A killing chain. It's difficult to get any momentum at all unless you can get a bunker or something. That map you saw there has one building that has a flight of stairs in it. If you can get up it, you can sometimes hold it for awhile and get a rhythm going before anyone gets you. Due to the nature of the game it can take awhile for someone who knows you're there to make it back to the place since people are constantly popping all over the place. Even if they get back over there they might figure you're not in there anymore and forget about it. I've been able to have runs of 5-10 kills which is far better than simply running around.

Team death match has been my favorite so far. One of the popular maps for this is called "Sweden". There are 2 opposing bases with 3 entrances/exits each. A central bridge, a couple sniper buildings, and lots of hiding spots to get the drop on people. Controlling the bridge usually means your team will win. From the bridge you can quickly move between all 3 entrances and exits (overlooking 2, direct access to 1) so a good team can cover everything and really pen in the other team. I played for a couple hours with a fellow calling himself 바보 (Korean for fool) followed by some other characters I forget. Very good and most maps were a duel between him and I for top spot. He won slightly more than me, but I had some very good games both on his team and against him where I started the game 6 or 7 and 0. In addition to your team winning the match the players individually compete for the most points during a game, and the game will inform you if you're currently leading. Annoying if two people are dueling like we were. "You've taken the lead! You've lost the lead! Assit! You've taken the lead!" it can get pretty rapid fire until someone pulls away.

Experience works interestingly in this game. You get XP based on the rank of the person you kill, assists (more than 60% damage to someone and then someone else kills them), head shots, and stacking kills. Each time you kill someone you get 5 seconds to kill another person to have it become a "multi-kill" twice I've hit 5 and once I hit 6. The progression is something like: multi, triple, monster, ultra, crazy then at 6 it just said "6 kills!!" Kind of a let down. It says that you get a big XP boost if you get 5 kills in a row like that.

I also got to make a new character and find out more about buying things. Characters and guns are permanent. Not rentals. Armor is a rental. Characters let you assign 7 points to various stats. To make an assault guy, a sniper, etc. I'll attach a screenshot below. Guns get repaired, and armor has to be bought every 30 days. It is nice to see guns as permanent. If you don't play for awhile you'll lose your armor and have to but it again, but at least your guns will be there. Some armor choices can be made between adding stuff to give more defense or more speed. Grenades aren't rentals but they can't be repaired. I assume when they run out you need to buy a new one, but it's okay, they're pretty cheap compared to everything else.

After playing this some more, I think I'll continue playing it. I didn't think it would stand-up to AVA, but it has proven more interesting than I initially though. So just because there is some girl holding a gun in an entirely inappropriate way on the website, don't pass the game over. You might be pleasantly surprised. I still don't know what "Justice for all" means. There doesn't seem to be any clear-cut sides in the game and they're referred to as mercenaries. The English in game is great. I didn't notice any weird sentences, so I think they've paid to have this professionally translated. At the time of writing this I'm ranked 158^th globally. So this really isn't that hard of a game to get into.

Unit

As I said in the last post, Unit is a first person shooter at Gamebus. This will be an easy post because Unit has an option to set everything to fully English. Text and voices. The English is good and there are in game guides and tutorials. So instead I'll talk a little bit about the game itself. I should mention the game is launched from the start menu, not the game page itself unlike many other games.

The game is a standard shooter. Nothing fancy here. Gain levels, buy equipment, get shot at. The graphics are serviceable, the ping low, and the sounds mediocre. I was getting some kind of crackling on the audio in game. It's a beta product and while momentarily distracting, I ignored it pretty fast. There are no advanced features like zooming in on your crosshairs or that kind of stuff. Zooming is limited to sniper rifles. You can add bots to games if you choose. They're dumb as a stick. I got killed because I thought an area was safe. You see there was a bot standing there not doing much so I assumed there was no bad guys. I turned the corner and was wasted. Apparently the bot didn't feel the need to shoot the enemy 3 feet in front of him. Lot's of standard upgrades. Guns, armor, grenades, knives, etc. You also upgrade your "character" by buying them in the store. It all works on points which you get from each match. At my level I could only use the trainee, later I can get a bunch of others, but I'm not really sure if it is just aesthetic or if there is function.

What's the attraction for this game? Well, the site allows foreign sign up via ARC or I-PIN and the game can be completely switched to English. Frame rate is great, I regularly got 100 FPS on max settings on my Geforce 7950GTX. The game is not head-shot crazy. Head-shots seem to require you actually aim at the head and even then it isn't completely guaranteed. Would I really choose it over other options? No. I'd still rather go to AVA or something over this, but if you must have a game in English try it out. You might want to sign-up, try it out and post on their free board just to encourage them to do more games full in English. Any company willing to do this should be encouraged even if the product is middle of the road.

Gamebus

Gamebus is another site we can add to the foreigner friendly crowd. Head on over to the site and choose the familiar sign-up option under the login box. We have a choice between using our regular ARC or using our I-PIN. I've decided to use the I-PIN. After you punch in your info you'll get a message of no consequence then you can agree to the terms. Leave them selected as is and hit the gray 확인 button in the lower right. You'll find the name and ID number already filled in. A couple notes here. During the address pop-up you'll have to input your whole address. Search for the postal code as usual, but before dismissing it, you can enter the rest of your address in the box below. Then click okay. Other forms has you do it after you close the pop-up. Not this one. Also do not make your password too long. You'll break it. It is asking for 4-8 letters. I entered a long password to see if it would choke. Instead it wrecked my account. I was getting an SQL login page error. I confirmed this by whipping up another account with my Korean friend's ID and putting in an appropriate length password. Works fine. I can't recover the old account because their password recovery can't seem to authenticate my ID, the name field isn't long enough to take my English name.

This is another small portal, but it does have a first person shooter on it called UNIT - Justice for All. Not sure what that means, but there is a scantily clad woman holding a sniper rifle like it's a purse or a perhaps a smoothie as part of the main graphic for the game. Not high hopes, but you never know. The game is currently in open beta.