Masked Forces – Review
Follow Genre: First Person Shooter, Multiplayer
Developer: Freeze Nova
Publisher: Freeze Nova
Platform: Steam(PC), iOS, Android
Tested On: PC

Masked Forces – Review

Site Score
5.0
Good: enough content for a very low price, Doomsday mode, leveling system
Bad: limited weapons/maps/modes, lack of real challenge, outdated graphics...
User Score
8.1
(13 votes)
Click to vote
VN:F [1.9.22_1171]
Rating: 8.1/10 (13 votes cast)

Blazing bullets, gigantic explosions and flesh wounds, everyone enjoys a good first person shooter now and then. There is an extensive selection of this genre on the market and each of them have their own theme, setting or audience. The past year has been showering us with multiple of these titles ranging from future warfare in Call of Duty Infinite Warfare back to the classic gunplay of DOOM. Aside from making choices of which one to pick, a small lesser known title called Masked Forces caught our attention. Masked Forces is a first person shooter available in the Steam Store. So, pack enough med kits and enough ammo, to enter the war-zone that is taking place in Masked Forces and let’s see if it’s worth the shot.

Masked Forces 1

Story

The story is about…err… well, actually there is no real story. This might seem quite odd as the title implies masked forces. At least you would some kind of story about highly trained, masked mercenaries that participate in missions around the world to perform heroic acts. Well, the game doesn’t exactly need a story as it’s simply a first person shooter as you point the gun at your opponent and pull the trigger. In other words, the game has put all of its focus on gameplay. Although it offers a campaign, it would’ve added more value to the game if it was accompanied with some story elements even if it was minimal. A lot of fps-fans do prefer a good story apart from an extensive multiplayer mode.

Masked Forces 2

Graphics

As far as the graphics go, they’re very much outdated, as there are better looking games on the market these days and you would expect more with the modern day graphic engines. This doesn’t particularly mean the game is hard to look at. The character models and textures look well-polished and don’t look like a pile of scruffy polygons but as there isn’t decent variation in character models, they all just look the same. This is bit of a missed opportunity as it could’ve added some much needed character to the game. As a player you can buy a limited selection of cosmetic changes for your character but it’s hardly enough. As for the weapons, they look a bit plain but doable, as they look like they ‘should’ but it’s just not enough to appeal to the masses. The maps on the other hand offer a lot of variation and are well built, but feel unfinished. They could’ve have used some more attention as the maps are full of structures and objects which can be boring to look at after some time. Something that felt really out of the ordinary, is the health bars floating over the heads of your enemies. It feels completely off and just looks really ridiculous, even if it matches the light RPG character of the game.

Masked Forces 3

Sound

The game hasn’t got a soundtrack, except for a simple funny music theme (a Holiday themed tune at the time of review) at the main menu instead of war-themed music. Well, it would’ve been more awesome to pull off a kill streak with booming metal music in the background. But as it is what it is, it’s far more important that your gun is making the right kind of sound when pulling that trigger. And it’s pretty accurate as every weapon sounds like its real-life counterpart. During matches, your endeavors and kill streaks are being cheered by a commentator with a limited vocabulary which could’ve have used a tad more lines to really make it appealing. Still, it’s funny to hear and boosts your morale through the harder moments in matches.

Masked Forces 4

Gameplay

First and foremost, Masked Forces is a first person shooter and it delivers just that. Unfortunately, as mentioned before, it has no single player story mode. At least not in the conventional way of most first person shooters. It offers a single player campaign consisting out of multiple missions and challenges that are divided in different levels of difficulty. You can take the ‘levels’ part quite literally as missions range from level 1 to 30. The missions themselves come in 3 varieties: death match, kill streak and survival. The classic death match requires you to gain a certain amount of kills before the other players by taking them down while kill streak requires you to kill a certain amount of enemies without getting killed. Last but not least, survival challenges you to survive for a certain amount of time while enemies are hunting you down.

Completing these missions grants you experience points and money. Masked Forces tries to combine these mission based single player with light role-playing elements. These RPG elements remain very limited as it only offers a leveling system just indicating your progress and the difficulty rating of the multiple missions. One would expect that the difficulty increases as you advance in level, but it’s mostly negligible and only felt challenging in the higher levels or the type of the mission. Another important extra of the leveling is the possibility to unlock new weapons or cosmetic items to buy. That is where the money comes in, when you cash in a lot of greens during your missions. These can also be used to upgrade the weapons you unlock and make you work for it before reaching your preferred weapon of choice. The only downside here is that the weapons or cosmetic items come in very limited supply.

Masked Forces 4

The AI itself isn’t exactly a smart cookie. The AI bots can be rather dumb at certain moments. For example: they walk past you at certain points without seeing you or only seem to be drawn to you as if they were tracking a GPS signal without flanking or smoking you out. The only annoying thing was that some of them were armed with an RPG launcher and shoot you in closed environments while blowing up themselves. At first, it might be a funny thing and hard not to laugh with, but it can be frustrating because of the monotone handling of the bots.

Apart from the ‘single player campaign’, Masked Forces offers an online pvp mode. Here you can either join an existing game or create a room where you can select both the map and the match type. There are only 3 match types: Free For All, Team Death Match and Doomsday. Free For All is the same as death match from single player, Team Death Match is joining a team and gaining the most kills for your team. But the ‘pièce de la résistance’ is Doomsday. This mode lets you go crazy in a death match, only armed with a RPG launcher and unlimited ammo. This ensures for some fun, chaotic and hilarious moments during matches with friends. The downside of the multiplayer mode is the lack of more match types such as classics like Capture The Flag or Assault and the limited amount of available maps.

Conclusion

Masked Forces is a generally a fun game with the wrong name, that borrowed a lot of ideas from games like Counter-Strike. Alas, it lacks the required level of quality and depth you would expect from modern day shooters. On the other hand, the game only costs you 0.99$/€0.99 on Steam or Android/iOS and succeeds in offering an acceptable amount of content for a very low price. It’s ideal for people who’re inexperienced in playing FPS games and can use this as ideal training grounds. Because of these elements, it’s hard to put a definitive score rating. Nonetheless, if it kept receiving the necessary attention and support it needs, Masked Forces might become a really decent first person shooter game worthy of praise.

VN:F [1.9.22_1171]
Rating: 8.1/10 (13 votes cast)
VN:F [1.9.22_1171]
Rating: +1 (from 3 votes)
Masked Forces - Review, 8.1 out of 10 based on 13 ratings
JasuSakura


Being over 30 years old, I've been playing videogames since I've exchanged my pacifier for a game controller. I've only recently started reviewing games and it's incredibly fun to do and educational as I get to know a lot of new stuff about videogames and the industry. My favourite game genres are RPG's(strategy RPG, J-RPG,...), adventure, platforming, simulation and retro.

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