Nexuiz Continues to Get Better with Each New Release

If you consider yourself to be a hardcore PC gamer, chances are very good that you’ve played a fair share of first-person shooters, and there’s reason for that. Who doesn’t love some fast-paced action where you get (most often) to kill anything that moves? Talk about a great stress-reliever! But with the sheer number of such titles available at any given time, have you ever given thought to the free options that exist?

Take Nexuiz, for example. This game has been popular in the first-person shooter arena for a while, thanks in part to the fact that it’s both free and open-sourced. That’s right. After fragging a few buddies, you can hop out and start modifying the code! Free games sometimes have a bad rep though, and it’s hard to disagree with the reasons. Due to the lack of a commercial backing, most FPS’ titles tend to be less-than-polished, and it’s too bad since many have some brilliant developers on-board.

Well, Nexuiz impressed us enough to earn itself a spot in our Top 10 Free Linux Games article in late 2006 (the game is also available for Windows and Mac OS X), and things just keep getting better. Version 2.5 was released just the other day, and I had to give it a go, and boy, was I pleased at what I saw. One huge beef I had with the game over the years was that the control never felt truly perfect… to compare it to a game like Quake III or something similar, differences were clear.

I’m not sure what in particular has been changed, but the game plays like an absolute dream with 2.5, and I found the control to be spot-on with the weapons a bit improved also (it actually feels like I’m hitting someone now). The control isn’t the only thing affected though… the entire game client almost doubled in size! So to say it was an overhaul would be an understatement. If you’ve never given this deathmatch gem a try, definitely check it out. After all, it’s free and well-designed, and if fast-paced bloodshed is your bag, there’s not much to dislike.

Besides new maps, a new game-mode, and new weaponry, the game bots have also been enhanced in this first 2009 release. The bots now have better support for team working, bunny hopping, swimming, better way finding, and support for ladders. The Nexuiz bots will also use less CPU usage and maps should load faster. When it comes to performance improvements, Nexuiz 2.5 has its server/client communication completely rewritten. The benefit of rewriting and optimizing this network communication is that the consumed bandwidth has been cut in half!