This game is set in a future in which the Earth is a dead planet, following an unfortunate accident involving some nuclear fissile material and the entire human race. Now the only visitors to our once green unpleasant lands are scavengers mounted on anti-gravity bikes, doing the futuristic equivalent of looting TVs from Radio Rentals. Your missions variously include... er... shooting everything and... shooting everything while collecting valuable artifacts. It's a bit like Interplay's Descent, really, but with slightly better motivation.

But let's not get too intellectual here, as the plot really doesn't matter a great deal. Forsaken is all about flying through tunnels and other 3D landscapes, shooting anything that gets in your way. To help you in that God-given task, you start out with nothing more than a rather puny laser cannon, but as you progress your ship will become increasingly powerful, thanks to some spectacular power-ups that put the fun back into thermo-nuclear violence.

The nausea that some players experience with Descent is still there, albeit alleviated to a certain extent by the palpable feeling that 'up' and 'down' are real directions, rather than being relative to the wall that you last bounced off. That's because the Forsaken designers have built a certain amount of self-righting stabilisers into the player's bikes, making it far easier for your confused brain to recognise where you are.

Which is all rather fortunate, because you'll have enough to do without worrying about whether or not the ceiling is floor. Forsaken has at least a dozen different nasty creations that are after your blood, and most of them, whether in tanks or anti-gravity bikes like yours, are pretty accomplished in the field of launching high explosives with uncanny accuracy. Play it on 'easy' mode for a while if you want to progress past the first stage. And if all the carnage in single-player mode weren't enough, you can also play Forsaken against up to 16 other players via a network. It brings a whole new meaning to the word 'frantic'.

Verdict
It's Descent with pretty graphics, but they are really pretty graphics. Playable, nice to look at and great fun in multi-player mode on the PC, Forsaken is not going to win any prizes for complex plotlines and character development, but it scores highly in the impressive explosion stakes.

Company: Acclaim

Tags: forsaken radio rentals god earth anti-gravity human eastern time zone free-to-play