Allegiance (also known as free allegiance) is a first person shooter game that is heavely based on team play. It was hard for me to decide which section to place this game as it is a combonation of first person shooter, real time strategy, massively multiplayer, and simulation. The game is placed in space where you can have games as big as 200 people playing at once against each other with up to eight teams. You can have different rules, but the most common is conquerer (you control all stations in the game). You can download the game at http://www.freeallegiance.org/. Below is a more in depth review.

history
The game was actually made a few years back (2000 if memory serves) by Microsoft; however, due to under exposure and perhaps other forces, the game never became popular and a few years later microsoft dropped the game, made it public domain, released the source code, and stopped running the server. After this, some committed members of the allegiance community took up the task of keeping the game alive, they have their own server now and there are numerous modifications for the game. To this day the game is still updated.
Fun fact: The game received the "Best game nobody played award" from gamestop in the year 2000.

gameplay
possibly the most attractive part of this game is the gameplay. This is not a simple first person shooter where you take your ship and go and kill the other team; instead, each team has a commander, the commander can be chosen by the team, or the previous commander can have designated the current commander, usually if the current commander leaves the game, it is given to the highest ranking player in the game.
Being the commander is like being the player in a real time strategy game, you are given all the money of all your team mates by default (they can decide to stop donating though; however, it is against the rules if done without permission). With the money you are to research items in the research tree (it is a generously large research tree) to improve the vehicles and upgrades your team can get. The commander is also responsible for giving commands to all players (including non-real players). Players are not forced to follow orders, but giving orders helps keep your team organized and helps them know what to do.
There are resources that must be collected by miners. Miners are required to receive orders by the commander, along with constructors. Some constructors require special rocks to build on. The commander also usually receives the most criticism in a game and is usually given credit for a win or loss; however, it's may not be the commander's fault.
The real aspect to winning a game is teamwork and coordination. The best coordinated team has the upper hand and can easily take out opponent bases. If a team is uncoordinated, their base may be attacked, but it will not be defended by the team because they are out going rambo by themselves on the enemy base. There are countlessly different strategies a team can use to attack and destroy the enemy. For instance: in big games, teleport bases are often used to get to the other side of the system quicker and even to help quickly get to the enemy base or back home.

graphics
obviously not great, since it was made in 2000; however, it is very light on the computer and any semi-recent machine can easily run it. The graphics are not horrible either, it is easy to see, and the interface is quite nice; however, if you do not like the interface, you can easily modify it to a different look if you like.

controls
The controls are configurable and easy to understand, but if you want, you can even plug in a joystick and use that to play. The game has a virtual joystick too so you can use your mouse to turn or you can just stay with the keyboard to turn and everything. (I personally prefer the joystick, but shoot better with the mouse).


All-in-all, I think this is the best game I've found so far, and it's free! It's fun to play and quite addictive, big games are extremely fun to play. The game also has protection for new players and has a simple yet effective tutorial. Try it out and have some fun, if i'm in the same game as you, you'll know, it's an easy name to see . I hope you try it out and have fun!

 

 

 

Reply