Great Freebie: Alliance of Valiant Arms

[Fatal_Papercut~SPARTA~]

Now that Steam is carrying a few free-to-play games, I decided to try one of them, and I think Alliance of Valiant Arms is a great game considering the marketing model.

 

AVA is a modern-day military-themed shooter, and the gameplay is very similar to Black Ops with a bit of Counter-Strike feel mixed in. There are three classes: Point Man, which is lightly armed but very fast; Rifle Man, which is a good all-around class; and Sniper. I've only put three hours into the game, but they were three contiguous hours; I was having a great time playing and was only able to pull myself away from the game when my body finally insisted on getting some sleep.

 

Like most F2P games, there is an in-game shop where you can spend real currency to buy weapon and equipment upgrades for your solider. For the most part, you would only need to spend real money to purchase weapons other than the stock weapons for each class. However, the stock weapons are quite good and effective, and the majority of the other pieces of equipment can be purchased using the in-game currency (EU credits) which you earn by playing the game. Most of the equipment that can be purchased this way is 'Expendable', meaning that the equipment degrades over time and must either be repaired between rounds (which also costs EU) or purchased again when it gets 'used up'.

 

I didn't get the impression that people playing with purchased items had any real advantage over those playing with stock equipment. Even during my first few rounds, I was very near the top of the leaderboards as a result of just playing smart. I haven't even bothered getting any of the items I can purchase with EU credit (not yet, at least) because I am doing just fine with the stock kits.

 

Over devs could also take a lesson from AVA's network coding. All games are peer-to-peer, yet I never saw any lag and the games ran very smoothly. All games are limited to 16 players.

 

My only complaint with the game so far is that the menus are a bit messy and more complicated than I think they should be. Other than that, for run'n'gun gameplay, AVA does a lot of things right.

[Hajimoto]

I played the game when it first was released (outside of Steam) and it was just another Combat Arms. One of thos e games that eventually became clogged with all the aim botters and wall hax