A relatively brief military-themed retro-FPS running on the Build Engine, which feels a bit like a mixture of Duke3D and Soldier of Fortune, but ends up vastly inferior to either. From the moment the game starts, a myriad of obvious issues begin to spring up from the undergrowth, bayonets raised to deliver a fatal blow to what could've otherwise been a fun way to spend a few hours.
The concept's a hard sell even at a base level: A game with a retro-shooter feel and control scheme, purpose-built for bouncing around linearly laid out levels at around mach 5, splattering evildoers with ludicrously powerful weaponry, but feeling somewhat misplaced in this semi-realistic setting, where every enemy is a generic soldier wielding hitscan weapons which tends to disincentivise direct confrontation and instead turns the action into either repetitively punching bullet-sized holes into terrorist skulls from half a mile away or nervous side-stepping through doorways with your shotgun at the ready, the barely visible crosshair sitting at roughly head-height, because if you're not putting out headshots you might as well not bother.
The weapon selection's not much worth talking about, again thanks to the setting, with a knife, a basic pistol and SMG, two assault rifles, a shotgun and a rocket launcher, the latter of which never saw any real use during my playthrough, since the helicopter boss that's supposed to close out this extravaganza got irretrievably stuck on the level geometry while approaching the readily laid out combat arena, thereby making the level impossible to finish. It's a janky game in general, full of choppy, awkward movement, inconsistent ai and harsh FPS-drops whenever it has to render large, open spaces, especially in the hideously bloated masterpiece of terrible level design that is the Dubai level.
But on occasion the pieces all fall into place correctly and there's some decent enough fights to be had, though the bland environments and small enemy roster do their best to hamper the fun. A final mention should go to the AI, which is a hilarious mess, both on the enemies and especially on your NPC allies, whose massive health pools fail to distract from the fact that they're a few rifles short of a platoon if you catch my drift, leaning towards spastic freakouts in place of functional pathfinding, speeding around corridors like they're on a sugar rush, falling off ledges, glitching behind walls and never quite understanding how to use stairs.
On the whole then, the best thing one could say about A.W.O.L. is that the price is about accurate. There's plenty of games made by passionate amateurs biting off more than they can chew, leaving half-baked ideas scattered all over the place, but when said ideas aren't even that great in the first place, then that's a pretty good sign that it's time to get back to the drawing board. This is the studio's first and sofar only game and while I haven't exactly been kind on it, the fact that it was actually released in a (mostly) functional state deserves some props on its own. A.W.O.L. isn't some kind of lazily hacked-out cash-in, but a deeply flawed game that mostly just needs some serious polish.
Final rating: 6.0/10
originally written on 11/06/2024
