Boxman Begins Demo

There are quite a few Minecraft-style game around, and even voxel based graphics have taken to a wider audience. Boxman Begins is a soon to be multiplayer arena shooter that uses the previously mentioned styles and fuses them together, wrapped in Unreal Engine 4.

At this time, in the demo stage, Boxman Begins feels like a blank canvas waiting to be filled. Its characters and levels are mostly composed of colored primitives between which you get to move, run, and shoot bots.

Since it runs very smooth, and shooters are always fun to play, adding stuff in can only make it more appealing. Right now, what appears to be the core gameplay is pretty good. Things work fine, shooting is good, character movement feels right, everything seems to fall into place and heading in a good direction. It’s quite enjoyable to shoot bots, but it would be even more so if they would shatter a bit when shot dead. Moreover, a bit of word destruction would be great.

It was a nice surprise to see that I could roundhouse kick a bot in the face when it got too close. Better still, you can even get some easy kills doing that but timing is key. You get to choose between four classes, each one with a specific weapon so preference aimed gameplay might be possible.

However, they could use a bit more diversity besides the type of weapon. I’d like to see the marksman be able to throw his weapon with deadly accuracy if he runs out of bullets, or the Trooper perform a quick melee takedown. Ramming an enemy with the Flanker or smashing them through a wall would also be fun. There are so many things that can be done from this point onward with Boxman Begins, but regardless of which the developers choose, diversity is a must.

Boxman Begins needs to find its special thing, its unique flavor that will set it apart. Right now, even though its minimalistic and smooth approach are very good, it needs that edge.