In Modern Combat Versus, you are straight away plopped into a group of space marine-type soldiers, fighting over a control point. As you defend your control point, the enemy team pour out of the woodwork, attempting to do their best to shoot you, before you shoot them. War 101, right?
As per many other first person shooter mobile games, you can move around the game using the left side of the screen and change your look direction with the ride side. What sets Modern Combat Versus aside from other first person shooters, however, is that the actual shooting is automatic. As your cursor hovers over enemy units, you will automatically fire your weapon. You can, however, double tap the right side of the screen to look down your sights and fire more precisely. This means the actual shooting of enemies doesn’t need to be a priority for you, just ensuring you watch your positioning.[sc name=”quote” text=”This means the actual shooting of enemies doesn’t need to be a priority for you, just ensuring you watch your positioning.”]
As you fight through the first few solo play levels wherein you are introduced to the different class types for your soldiers, allowing you to pick between Assassins, Tanks and basic damage dealers. As you progress through the game, you earn the ability to unlock even more varied heroes, all with their own unique powers. Each type of soldier has a unique ability giving them some small, rechargeable bonus. The basic soldier type gains the ability to use Augmented Reality to deal more damage for a short time, whereas Tanks often have some kind of damage absorption or gaining the ability to heal teammates.
Each different soldier also has different base stats and damage, ensuring that whatever soldier type you pick, you always have some kind of contribution to the battle. This is an important factor in any multiplayer PvP battle arena, as every player needs to feel useful.
In popular games such as Overwatch, every Hero has designated abilities and roles, each being their own individual character. Modern Combat Versus attempts to copy that by giving each type of soldier their own voice acted catchphrases and personalities that mimic their playing style.
The problem is that this falls a bit short when each soldier is essentially just a bundle of armor tied together around someone with a gun. Alongside that, though the insanely flashy random sound bites of the player characters are very well done and voice acted, they feel overpowering – hearing “OMG changing my status!” in some sort of imitation-DVA voice is a bit offputting in a hectic gunfight.[sc name=”quote” text=”hearing “OMG changing my status!” in some sort of imitation-DVA voice is a bit offputting in a hectic gunfight.”]
The design and ascetic of Modern Combat Versus have clearly been a core point of development. The game looks visually stunning and the effort put into making the combat map look interesting and detail-rich is noticeable, but the efforts put into making the character unique fall substantially short.
Even without distinguishable characters, however, the combat and core gameplay of Modern Combat Versus is inherently fun. Everyone loves PvP first person shooters, as long as they function properly and they have something that’stops it from being “point, click and shoot”. Thankfully, Modern Combat Versus ensures you will always find some new character to spend your time on and test new abilities to affect the playermap.
Are the characters and lore distinct and interesting? Not so much, but Modern Combat Versus is still a huge amount of fun, even if everyone looks the same.
[review pros=”The gunplay and core mechanics are a lot of fun. The different abilities for each soldier allows everyone to feel useful.”
cons=”The different soldiers don’t feel distinct enough to differentiate between them.” score=7]
[appbox appstore id1121667177]
[appbox googleplay com.gameloft.android.ANMP.GloftMVHM]
