Exteel – First Look

A few days ago I mentioned that NCSoft’s Exteel opened up it’s Beta up to the public. So I went ahead, signed up and now have a few hrs into the game with my level 9 Corporal Mech. I gotta say that I’m loving the game so far, its basically like a extremely fasted paced version of Counter Strike. You log into a central chat area, similar to Blizzard’s BattleNet, and you can chat with other players as well as see a list of open games.

Once you join a game it’s strictly a FPS. There are all the usual game types, FFA, team, control points, as well as a survival type where players battle NPC mechs for a set period of time. There are no rounds, its all set to a timer with unlimited respawns for players, however the more often you die the longer it takes for you to respawn. Once the timer expires, the game ends and players receive XP and money(credits) depending how they did.

Once your back in the main chat room, you can go to your hangar to upgrade your Mech by purchasing better armor or weapons. Aside from upgrading your mech, you also earn XP to use on your Pilot to increase attributes, such as health, energy, aim, etc.

There are also Skills you can add to your mech to give them special moves to do. Currently you have to purchase these skills with credits, an idea I’m not very fond of. Even more so since these skills aren’t permanent, they have a 30 day timer, so you will eventually lose them and considering they aren’t cheap it seems like a waste of money. I think skills should be earned by winning matches as opposed to buying them, hopefully they’ll change this later on.

Aside from that, the graphics are pretty good, controls are very easy to learn and fun. Considering this is still in beta, I think the game can only get better.