Shogo – Mobile Armor Division
Monolith Productions

Size does matter, if you’re a game:

Wolfenstein, Doom, Dark Forces, Duke Nukem, Quake, Jedi Knight, Unreal, all big games, all sporting a different engine boasting some advantage over the one before. Doom made this type of game big and single handedly sold more PC’s than anything else. Then came Dark Forces that used an engine that allowed them to create huge out door areas and have rooms above another. Then Duke Nukem came adding Hi-Res graphics (wow, SVGA) and a more interactive environment, plus of course a loud mouthed Duke. Then came Quake, which totally removed the fun from single player, yet was full 3D (almost) and made Multiplayer gaming big (out in 1995 and still one of the biggest multiplayer games). This also led to Quake 2 which is the most played Multiplayer game ever (yet also has a redundant single player mode). Next up is Jedi Knight which has exactly the same advantages over Quake as Dark Forces had over Doom, large outdoor areas and more interactive. Also used to have the best Single player mode in any game, until now. Now it’s Unreal, which boasts the best graphics engine of them all as well as the ability to make large levels and has very evasive A.I. Now while this game looks nice and has an ok single player mode, it lacks in multiplayer, mostly due too horrendous pings and boring weapons (not all mind you). So what now, well here we have the next big thing in a way, the Lithtech engine.

It can do all what the others can almost, it has some of the loveliest special effects you’ve seen and a wonderful capacity to be tweaked. The first game to use this engine is Shogo (next comes Blood 2 and then another project that I don’t know much about) which tries something new for this type of game. Now this have been reviewed already a thousand times, but I am reviewing the final patched version which is a vast improvement on the normal version.

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