E.T. Armies

I went into E.T. Armies genuinely curious. It carries a small piece of gaming history behind it: Raspina Studio out of Iran, releasing one of the first commercially exported FPS titles from that country after trade sanctions lifted. That context is worth acknowledging, but curiosity and goodwill only carry a review so far, and the game asks you to spend both pretty fast. You play as a Parsis soldier, a kind of special forces operative, tasked with pushing back against the Forsaken, a faction of humans left behind on a ruined Earth who have unified around vengeance. The setup has genuine sci-fi bones, drawing loose inspiration from titles like Killzone. The problem is that the story is delivered through hammy dialogue and cliched characters that never build any tension, and the English voice acting frequently sounds like the studio was working in a second language without a native speaker in the booth to course-correct. It is not charming rough-around-the-edges stuff. It is just rough. The actual shooting, to its credit, functions. You carry an arsenal that includes a couple of assault rifles, a shotgun, a sniper rifle, and a pistol with unlimited ammo as a fallback. Regenerating health keeps the pacing brisk, and burst-firing over sustained spray is the smarter move since the hit registration gets sloppy during full-auto. The game funnels you into surrounded firefights regularly, occasionally producing a decent set piece, and the Unreal Engine 3 particle work throws screen-filling smoke and ember effects at you to keep things visually noisy. There is a Brutal difficulty mode for players who want a harder test, and a sniping mission that breaks up the corridor loop in a way that briefly feels purposeful. The issue is that the level design outside those moments is mostly a sequence of grey-brown corridors opening into slightly wider grey-brown rooms. The AI neither flanks nor communicates threat credibly: enemy snipers laser-target you before their aim animation even resolves, allies fire into cover because that is where your target is, and the whole thing operates on rules that feel more scripted than reactive. Invisible collision walls keep you from drifting off the linear path, and the save system is distant and opaque enough that a crash or quit can send you back an entire level. Multiplayer technically exists: two maps, standard modes, kill-streak rewards. It was empty within a week of launch and has not recovered. The FOV is locked low enough to cause genuine discomfort on wider monitors, and while a post-launch patch addressed controller support and key binding, the core feedback issues were never resolved. The campaign runs three hours on a normal playthrough, maybe four if you are struggling. That is the whole package. The honest read here is that E.T. Armies is a competent first effort from a studio operating with limited resources in a market that had not previously shipped games to western storefronts. If you find that context meaningful and you want a no-frills linear FPS that lasts one evening without demanding much from you, it functions. For anyone with a backlog of better shooters or a competitive FPS habit, the ceiling here is not high enough to justify the climb. Alex, Scout Team