Coded Arms is a fast-paced and aesthetically stunning first-person shooter set within a hastily abandoned Virtual Reality system. The VR universe was originally conceived as a training device to prepare mankind for an alien invasion, but was hurriedly shut down when the system became self-aware and created a brutal world populated with virtual, yet hostile alien races. Cast as a hacker, the player is equipped with an array of hi-tech weaponry and must cleanse the VR world of its unsavoury denizens.Genre : FPS
Publisher: Konami
Developer: Konami
Release Date: Summer 2005
The first thing you need to know about Coded Arms is that it’s an odd game. Konami has taken their best shot at cramming a fast-paced, no-holds-barred first-person shooter into the PSP, and to look at the screenshots, it’d appear as though they’ve done it.
The first question someone asked, at Konami Gamers’ Day, was how the game controlled. The PSP doesn’t have a right analogue stick, and both its D-pad and thumbstick are on the left side of the unit. Traditionally, a good console FPS has mapped the camera controls to the right thumbstick.
In Coded Arms, you look around by tapping the face buttons: Triangle looks up, X down, Square left and Circle right. It feels a lot like an old shooter, such as Marathon, that didn’t support mouselook.
At the same time, Coded Arms looks very new. In it, you play the role of a nameless hacker who’s found his way into an abandoned virtual reality construct. Formerly used by the military as a combat simulation, it’s now the site for online war games that pit humans against each other, or against the construct’s array of defenses.
Inside the system, the construct translates its features, bugs, and other invaders into antagonists like armored warriors or giant clawed aliens, who pursue you across a series of dystopian environments. When something dies, it breaks apart into a shattered wireframe model, and power-ups come in the forms of new programs or bits of code. There’s a lot of attention to detail in Coded Arms, both in its surprisingly vast environments and in the small animations and bits of flair that help to perpetuate the illusion. You can really buy into the idea that this is virtual reality.
As you explore the (as of the current build) boldly plotless environment, you can grab various weapons and items to improve your arsenal or your character. There are more than thirty guns to choose from, such as machine guns, assault rifles, pulse cannons, and grenades, and you can hold onto these weapons as you go up against your friends in Coded Arms’s wireless multiplayer mode.
More importantly, when you take another player on, one of those powerups is up for grabs. If you lose a round in multiplayer, you’ll lose one of your powerups, which’ll be transferred to the winner. Not only does this mean that each player will have distinctly different configurations, it means you’ll be constantly evolving over the course of deathmatch. This is probably the best thing that Coded Arms brings to the table, and I’d like to see future shooters improve upon this idea.
It’s not the best shooter in the world and it’s got undeniable problems with its bizarre control scheme, but Coded Arms isn’t another shovelware FPS. Konami’s put a lot of planning and thought into this, and it shows while you’re playing it. For a portable FPS, this is amazing, and I’m looking forward to trying out the multiplayer.
More articles about Coded Arms