Asus 128mb PhysX Card Review/Preview

Cell Factor combat Training

Cell Factor is currently in its beta stages and Ageia have released a one-map playable demo beta. It has some very nice HDR effects and the graphics are pretty decent although once again slightly drab. Perhaps it is the genre?

The game is currently a multiplayer game that gives you a gun, a barrel mounted grenade launcher, a kind of “gravity grenade” that draws up everything near it in a big bundle. You also get some pretty cool “psi” abilities. You can psi-pull pieces of the environment towards you and psi-push it away again. This combines with a power-up that gives you some psi-flying ability and you have a game that really shows what Ageia’s card can do to gameplay.

You can kill your adversaries with large objects and hurt them with smaller rebounding objects and you can certainly have fun playing around with all the exciting physics around you.

Gameplay

Just a small comment on gameplay at this time. It isn’t amazing it has to be said and is actually a pretty strange game to get used to. You can zoom in your rifle but it has a lot of kick-back (think the AWP in Counter-Strike). The thing that has made me go back and play this game again and again is simply the physics in it: they are nothing short of awesome to play. It’s fun to actually blow stuff up. It’s fun to mess around and rip up cloth or blow up a barrel with some kind of toxic waste in it. I have spent quite a bit of time in this game just for the physics rather than the gameplay.

Remember though: Cell Factor is in beta so I am going to give Ageia the benefit of the doubt.

Screenshots and video’s

I have rather a larger array of video’s of Cell factor as I feel that this game shows off PhysX rather more than G.R.A.W.

First off I launched a grenade into a big pile of boxes: