CrimeCraft has its work cut out for it. It’s coming out during a period of gaming where MMOs are as common as an FPS was in 2004, as no less than 16 top-shelf Massively Multiplayer Online titles will be hitting the consumer market by 2011. Somehow, CrimeCraft has to figure out a way to trump them all. First among its many challenges will be to convince the general consumer that the name is not, in fact, a joke. The tongue-in-cheek title--an obvious reference to the uber-popular World of Warcraft--speaks to the developer’s aspirations as well as their willingness to tackle the world leader head-on. CrimeCraft tries to meld the experiences of the MMO genre with the fast skill-based gameplay of a third-person shooter, at which it both succeeds and falls short in various ways. At E3 2009, Vogster was kind enough to give me a guided walkthrough of the game. In my admittedly brief hands-on play session, I was able to experience the combative shooter gameplay but was not allowed to catch a glimpse at how the matches would be tied together with the MMO overworld. What I did play came with mixed results: I was a little surprised, a little confused, and a little impressed.

Both the shooting and adversarial modes of CrimeCraft are quite fun, as this part of the game seems to play quite well. I was able to pick up the controls within minutes and felt that the game was solid enough to compete solely as a shooter. The only issue that I found was that the visuals aren’t exactly gorgeous. It’s not that the graphics look bad--in fact they look rather good for a realistically styled MMO--but they look dated during the multiplayer matches. This is mainly because the animations for character movement are borderline hideous in most cases. It’s an issue that many players will be able to overlook if they aren’t really concerned with graphical fidelity, but others may find it distracting in this age of glitz and over-zealous particle effects. It’s important to note that CrimeCraft was not a finished product when I played it, and this article is not a final review. However, I simply hope that these issues are chief on Vogster’s to-do list as the game enters its beta stage and is readied for store shelves.