Infantry

Infantry Review

Originally released way back in 1999, Infantry was picked up by Station.com, the same company behind Ever Quest. At first Infantry was part of the ‘Station Pass’ which gave players access to 3 games; Infantry, Tanarus, and Cosmic Rift for $6.99 a month. In 2007 Sony (the owners of Station) announced that all three Station Pass games would be made free to play. Infantry suffers from outdated 2d graphics and a strange control scheme. Rather than W,A,S,D controlling movement like most FPS games, Infantry relies on the arrow keys.

Infantry consists of multiple servers which each act as almost distinct games. Unfortunately, Infantry has lost most of its player base over the years which means there are only a few populated servers available today. Eol Advanced seems to be the most popular server and is classified as the ‘RPG’ server. I tried playing on this server but couldn’t get anywhere. Before joining the game players must pick a class (hit F11) then join the game (F12) but that isn’t enough, next players have to purchase ammo. (f10) All this wouldn’t be a problem if it automatically came up, step by step. Instead, players are left to wonder what to do next. After getting all the appropriate equipment, new players will find that they cannot use the same teleporters as everyone else, they must step on the special newbie zone teleporters. The newbie areas consists of several floors filled with NPC droids. These droids fire on you mercilessly before you can even see them and kill you in a few hits. After several attempts to navigate my way past the newbie area, I gave up and left Eol Advance.

The other two major servers are much easier to play and understand. First up is CTF Extreme. Here, two teams battle it out for control point marked by flags. Players must first select a class of which there are about a dozen. There are several types of classes, different types of soldiers who just fire and more ‘assist’ oriented classes. For example, an officer can teleport team mates to himself and the medic can heal other players. The other major server is called ‘Infestation’ which plays a lot like CTF except that one side gets to play as aliens. The aliens are more melee oriented but have more HP than the marines. I found this mode to be the most exciting, the alien classes vary a great deal from each other. The Infestation server reminded me of a popular half life mod called ‘Natural Selection.’

Infantry is an old game that still retains some of its charms. Sony has finally made it free to play but I fear they were a bit too late. The charm Infantry had is now locked behind out date graphics, controls, and a difficult learning curve. Infantry is one of the oldest MMOFPS games and many of the features it introduced still define the genre. Now that its free, those of you who are curious or interested in older games can give it a try.

Infantry Screenshots

Infantry Video

Infantry Links

Official Site

Wikipedia Page