Nerf Arena Demo

Fast-paced multiplayer shooters are all about who gets to kill everyone else the fastest, using the biggest weapons they can find. Rockets, hollow-point bullets and lasers are the preferred methods of inflicting pain on the other players, although there are many more creative ways to splatter them every which way, depending on the game you are playing.

Nerf Arena is a first-person shooter that does not measure entertainment in gallons of blood and focuses on the actual shooting instead, by replacing the bullets with plastic projectiles and removing the death concept entirely. Hence, you can knock out foes with a well-placed bullet, but you certainly won't be able to redecorate the environments with their entrails like in Unreal Tournament.

However, other than the lack of proper weapons, the action pretty much evolves in the very same way, since the fast-paced nature of the game has you constantly shooting and running around. There are multiple types of nerf guns to choose from, each one of which is more powerful than the other, or it provides you with a more rapid fire rate. Naturally, these can be found throughout the levels and they are dropped whenever you get knocked out.

In order to eliminate repetition and minimize the boredom risk, the game provides you with a few other modes for multiplayer. Thus, while PointBlast is a classic free-for-all arena in which the player with the biggest gun is the favorite, SpeedBlast is actually more of a race and you can use the guns to slow down the other competitors and remain in the lead for as much as possible, by any means necessary.

Visually, it is worth noting that the game uses the Unreal engine in order to render the environments, although not a lot of work went into the models themselves. Thus, while the levels are rather detailed and they can pass unnoticed, the player models and the guns are rather blocky, which means that the developers did not really take full advantage of what the engine could offer.

Nerf Arena is a fresh take on the genre it deserves a bit of praise for being able to captivate the players even without gore. However, there are some gameplay issues that just might not let you fully enjoy the game, especially when it comes to how the players interact with the environment. The graphics can be a bit had to swallow, especially in this day and age.