OpenSpades

Ace of Spades is a game that blends Minecraft with online shooters, such as Counter-Strike or Team Fortress 2 and features a fully destructible environment, as you might expect. Thus, although the graphic quality is even poorer than it is in Minecraft, the whole idea behind such games is the fun factor, which definitely overcomes any technical defects.

OpenSpades, on the other hand, is a GPLv3, community-made client for Ace of Spades that disregards the said flaws and features a very powerful graphic engine, which is capable of rendering state-of-the-art effects to go along with the entertainment. Thus, in case you value the looks and you are tired of the pixelated original, this client can definitely be a solution.

To start off with, it is worth noting that the client works on the vanilla servers, which means that it doesn't really matter what client everyone else on the server uses. Hence, you do not have to worry about finding special servers to run this version, especially since it is also capable of supporting both the latest and the previous Ace of Spade installments.

Among the special effects that are available in this installment, you can find anything from improved post-processing and better particles, to high-end settings, such as global illumination and linear HDR rendering. As with the original game, this client also uses the OpenGL library to render the graphics, but it also supports a software mode. Last, but not least, the experience can be improved even further by activating the Antialias options, ranging from MSAA2X to 4X FXAA, which definitely minimizes the amount of ragged edges visible on higher resolutions.

Naturally, there are some inconveniences as well, most of which regard the fact that the client is still rather experimental and you can always stumble upon bugs. The biggest issue, however, is that these effects more often than not require a pretty powerful computer in order to maintain a decent frame rate, not to mention the fact that they can seriously affect your latency and cause you severe lagging problems, if you exaggerate with the enhancements.

In the end, OpenSpades truly is a huge step forward from the vanilla version, especially when it comes to the textures and the special enhancements that can be applied with the supplied launcher. However, you need to be careful with the settings, since not all of them are properly optimized yet.