Hired Team: Trial Demo

Multiplayer shooters need a sturdy set of gameplay mechanics and a nice collection of weapons to attract a decent fan base, although elements like level design, graphics and physics must also fall in line as well. Big names like Quake and Counter-Strike gambled a lot on this and won the lottery, but that doesn't mean it works all the time and that it is easy to come up with the right recipe for success.

Hired Team: Trial is an attempt to take the best out of the most popular titles out there and integrate them in a relatively different setting, in order to provide the players with a new experience. While the mechanics are basically the same as in Unreal Tournament or Quake, there are subtle elements that aim to disguise them as something new and refine the overall gameplay experience as much as possible.

While the multiplayer component is definitely the focus of the game, a bit of effort went into the background story as well, in order to explain the environment and the reason for the conflict. Not a lot of originality went in with this effort, on the other hand, so the fact that everything revolves around future soldiers training in a virtual environment should not dazzle anyone, nor cause more than a few seconds of pondering on the subject.

As previously mentioned, the weapons must provide the players with a challenge and they must be fun to wield, while also being rather tricky to master on the long run. Unfortunately, this is not really the case with the game at hand, since the guns lack any kind of attractiveness and they quickly get boring after you use them for a few minutes. The bad graphic design is not really helping either, due to the fact that none of them looks too impressive or interesting.

Speaking of which, the visual appeal is a major downside as well, considering the fact that a lot more could have been done with the technology available at the time. This also has a rather unpleasant impact on the atmosphere itself, since it is pretty difficult to imagine yourself in a futuristic computer world when everything around you is blocky and the special effects are barely noticeable.

While Hired Team: Trial is not exactly bad, it also fails to impress in any way and it can certainly pass unnoticed through a crowd of multiplayer shooters. Since it chose not to bring anything original to the table and just reuse what others have already done, there is really nothing worth remembering about the game, unless you haven't played anything else.