“Hey guys, it looks like we’ve been given the job of making a new game.”

“Awesome idea. By this time next year we’ll be millionaires!”

And so another budget game is born. A little harsh, I know, but it seems that here at least, money controls the quality of a product. Budget games aren’t the best almost by definition because the developers have less cash to spend. No money for fancy graphics, no money for advanced physics, no money to spend on increasing the testing or development time. On the surface of things, it looks like there’s no way of getting out of this mess. That is, until you consider what doesn’t cost any money: imagination, decent ideas, inspiration and creativity. Just because your budget is low doesn’t mean that you can’t make a game that’s full of character and charm, originality and innovation. Yet it seems that some people just keep on producing the same old tat over and over again. Now I’m not naming names - you can look up the perpetrator later - but when a game arrives on your doorstep from the publishers of Perfect Ace, the most abysmal game you’ve ever played, it doesn’t fill you with much confidence.

Yet March! Offworld Recon starts out okay. Apart from the rather odd name, it only has no dodgy grammatical errors on the cover unlike Perfect Ace’s nine. March! is a first person shooter set in the future where humanity is at risk again. The colonization of Mars has been abandoned “because of numerous difficulties” and few remain on the red planet. Suddenly the Martian satellite control system starts reporting strange data and then the satellites break down. The Government - presumably of Earth - sends a team out to take a look, but the investigation turns into a fight for survival. It’s your job to lead the team and find out what’s going on.

So the plot’s not original by any stretch of the word and the game doesn’t really convey it well either. Your character is a brightly coloured robot, or maybe it’s a person in a suit, it’s not quite clear. Your fellow four team members accompany you and are equally clad in nice red paint and shiny armour. The game makes no real attempt to make you like the characters you play or even explain who the actually are. Maybe you’re not the ‘good guys’, maybe the real heroes are the ones fighting against you - but March! doesn’t tell you or even hint at it. It feels overwhelmingly like a bolted-on storyline, used as an excuse to fire some big guns at some bug robots and stuff. How elegant.

March! is a first person shooter then, there’s nothing hiding that. Yet it doesn’t even try to be original, as the readme file confesses, “March!: Offworld Recon is a dynamic arcade First - Person Shooter resembling Serious Sam’ or Red Faction.” It goes on, listing the supposedly distinguishing characteristics of the game; “Gameplay demanding various tactics and presupposing fights with unique opponents (the so-called ‘bosses’)”. Well now that’s something I’ve never seen before. ‘Various tactics’? ‘Bosses’? Wow, the novelty! It goes on; “The player has a ‘fire support team’ which may act independently and under the player’s control”. A distinguishing feature? How many tactical games involve an A.I. controlled squad? Exactly. It doesn’t stop there though; “The robots of the team use the same various pick-ups as the player and have special skills which may be useful in different tactical situations.” Pick-ups? Like the ones in almost every single first person shooter out there? The best ‘distinguishing characteristic of the lot is this one though; “The single-player mode uses some concepts typical of multi-player games like ‘Capture The Flag’. Damn that’s original.

Enough sarcasm for now. To its credit, there is one vaguely distinguishing feature in March! and that’s the way is handles weapons. Your shiny red robot person is equipped with a chaingun to begin with and this can then be upgraded by collecting little silver boxes that litter the levels. This modular approach allows you to switch around the primary and secondary weapons to whatever you need. Although it’s just a simple way of getting round having multiple single weapons - which I’m not sure is a good idea anyway - it does set it apart from other games a little bit.

The whole squad gameplay aspect of March! is underdeveloped as well. Your four teammates just stroll around behind you, occasionally stopping to fire randomly at incoming enemies. They don’t get behind cover, get out of your way when you need to get somewhere or even move when an automatic door repeatedly slams down on their head. There is a rudimentary command system, but it’s far too basic to be of any use. Unlike Call of Duty, there never seems to be any team spirit at all. Your squad only talk to you when you give them commands and even then it’s the same old pre-recorded answers. If you’re going to put teammates in a game, then they should at least be competent soldiers and fairly intelligent.

Playing March!, you get a strong sense of déjà vu. Run from A to B through corridors that look all the same, shoot at cloned A.I. enemies which relentlessly follow you and then backtrack through the whole level to find that door you’re supposed to go through. It’s as if we’ve gone back in time to when first person shooters were a novelty. The first level takes place on spaceship which is exploding around you (haven’t we been here before on a certain Xbox game?) where you have a couple of objectives. After running down endless passages and through pointless rooms, you’re introduced to your team in the most simplistic cutscene possible and then you’re off fighting various robots. They bumble towards you in the same fashion that you’ve seen in dozens of games before, until you either die or you kill them. It’s as if they have been programmed to “” and that’s it. They don’t seem to work together as a team, but then again your squad doesn’t, so why should they? On top of this, there seems to be nothing to direct the player through the linear levels. You can easily end up blundering around the maps, looking for the door you’ve yet to open. We’ve seen March!’s gameplay a million times before and it’s a strong reminder that innovation is better than imitation.

Graphically, March! is about as average as average can be. There’s a range of resolutions and detail settings at which you can play, which is always useful, and the minimum requirements are low for a first person shooter. Characters, weapons and scenery are all reasonably well done, but nothing to write home about. The game’s animations are basic, but March! does use some nice special effects during battles. Notably, you can swap to a 3rd person viewpoint, although this isn’t very useful since you cannot aim accurately at all once in it. Although it runs smoothly and appears to be glitch-free, the occasional oddity pops up, for instance starting a multiplayer map with your legs actually in the floor. Like the graphics, the audio isn’t anything special either. The sound effects are accomplished, but they are repeated too often, making them tiresome. Music accompanies the action, which is again done to a reasonable standard but is repetitive. March! visuals and audio aren’t necessarily bad, but they’re just not polished to the standard which PC gamers are used to.

Like almost all PC first person shooters, March! supports both online and offline multiplayer. Over a LAN or on the internet, you can fight in the usual Deathmatch and Team Deathmatch modes, although the number of levels available is frighteningly low. The maps themselves aren’t very original either, in keeping with the rest of the game. Anyone who buys March! will probably get the most enjoyment out of the multiplayer mode, which is fun if you ever find anyone online. Ultimately though, there are far better and more popular multiplayer games out there, and this won’t be your first port of call for online gaming.

So March! Offworld Recon isn’t exactly going to revolutionise the genre. Nor is it original, innovative, clever, creative or any of the other things I mentioned earlier. It does what it sets out to do though; provide some first person action at a budget price. I’m not going to let it get away with that though, because if the industry keeps producing games like this then all we’ll be left with is mountains of generic tat. Even with a low budget, you can create a game that is so much better than March!, especially a first person shooter. There are so many good examples of how to make a decent game out there that there’s no excuse to make such a generic and unimaginative game like March!. Even with its £19.99 price, it shouldn’t tempt many when you can pick up a far superior game like Half Life for £5. In the end, March! Offworld Recon is just painfully, painfully average.