Developer Orion has been working on Hellforces for quite awhile and the game is slowly but surely coming together and being refined to a playable game. We've seen previous versions of the game and the latest build we've played is a one-hundred percent improvement over the previous version.

For those of you who haven't paid attention to this game, Hellforces is a first-person shooter for the PC that tells the tale of a young man who has lost his friend (a wayward girl) to drugs and the dark forces of the underworld. The backstory of Hellforces is all about this young man's bad experiences with this girl, a drug addict who goes to a cult to get drugs and ends up the subject of an experiment that turns her into the living dead. Apparently this experiment empties the soul and leaves the body vulnerable to possession by otherworldly entities. These demons inhabit the victims and turn them into mindless shambling undead. His friend and everyone else involved with this satanic cult apparently go on a rampage and destroy the city, leaving it a broken and battered ruin. But that's not the only forces at play. These entities are part of a greater plot by a powerful demon who wants to unleash Lucifer on Earth.

The story opens with the protagonist telling his story to an Interpol agent - propelled forward by in-game cinematic sequences and graphic novel style art with voice dialogue. The way the story is told is reminiscent of the delivery method in Ecks vs Sever for the Game Boy Advance - the protagonist tells his story as if it has already happened, and players then engage in the action as if it were a memory. The presentation in the game is nice, though the English translation needs a bit of tweaking and some of the voice dialogue's delivery needs an injection of emotion. This is a common symptom for games made in non-English speaking countries, but hopefully Buka can up the ante a little bit in the next round of voice-overs and bring the quality level up a bit higher.

When the action starts the player finds himself in a burned out urban area, with a pipe nearby (which is the first weapon you'll pick up in the game) and a burning man running towards him. This will be the player's first crack at playing Casey at bat with this weapon, which is pretty handy for dispatching the myriad of living zombies and the marauding undead types in and around this battered and burning urban area. Later on players will traverse an interesting mix of underground areas, indoor areas, underground strongholds, crypts, sewers etc. As players move along they'll find new weapons and objects that they can use including shotguns, machine guns, baseball bats, butcher knives, six shooters, etc. The animation for these weapons needs a bit of work, but the basic are there and they get the job for the most part.

Rag doll physics functionality is also in Hellforces, though they still need some tweaking, along with some nice graphical effects that work pretty well and add some nice flavor to the mix. The physics are neat and but like everything else in the game, they are not yet fully implemented so it is hard to determine if they will work effectively in the final product. Likewise some basic animation and modeling has been implemented, and while these elements are not quite ready for prime-time the game is slowly but surely making progress across the board.

Hellforces does have potential for being a hit but there's a lot of tweaks required and a number of kinks that have to be ironed out before the game can carve its own niche in a picky first-person action market. The beta we looked at presented a game that is obviously still in the early stages of development, but to make Hellforces rise above the mediocrity of the FPS genre Buka really needs to spit shine this pair of shoes to become more than just another "so what title" with a horror back-drop.

Creating a horror action game these days is a real gamble, and developers need to really create a backstory and a game universe that is unique in every way. If you're going to create a game where hell is overrunning the Earth, then you have to really raise the bar to meet the challenge of games already embraced by the first-person shooter community. Hellforces kind of has that flavor, but (pun intended) the road to hell is paved with good intentions..

Having said all that, as an early beta Hellforces does have a lot of potential. The story could be interesting with some tweaking, the settings are interesting and fun, and the premise is a little more involved than most first-person shooters. For now we'll remain cautiously optimistic that the final version of this game is going to offer refined gameplay, robust multiplayer and a story that is worth unraveling to the bitter end. One of the biggest obstacles Buka faces in doing a horror-themed action game is its inevitable comparison to heavyweights like DOOM 3 and Painkiller. The million dollar question is can it even stand in the long shadows cast by these games? We don't have the answer to that question yet, but we'll let you know when this game is released later this year.

It should also be pointed out how much this game is evolving between versions. The first version we played was an awful mess, looked ugly and had a lot of technical problems. The latest version we played had voice acting, animation, rag doll physics a more robust graphics engine and a whole lot more. Here's to hoping that the subsequent version can offer similar improvements and make this game a hit. We're cautiously optimistic that it's possible. Stay tuned.