In the current landscape of gaming, there are many ways a game can justify itself. A game can be good control-wise, or netcoding-wise, and thus feel really good to play. A game can have surprising depth, or interesting mechanics. A variety of tools at your disposal, a funny quirk that makes you laugh, cool looks or even trading cards that make the purchase worth it.
All this is to say that Alternis has none of this.
Alternis is an early access arena fighter that has five weapons, three maps, and four gamemodes. The five weapons are "None", "Sword of Dawn", "Navy", "Bone Bow" and "Fireball". None starts you with no weapons (there is no melee button). The Sword of Dawn is a sword with a two hit combo and a block button - the two hits do nothing different, and the block button does not block unless the opponent aims at the sword. The Navy is a six shot revolver that has iron sights that do nothing because it is perfectly accurate at all ranges, that threeshots on both bodyshots and headshots. The Bone Bow is a bow and arrow with no bullet drop, and oneshots on a headshot, twoshots on a bodyshot. The fireball is an arcing projectile that arcs so harshly that you cannot hit anything at ranges outside of melee, and twoshots. The Maps are "FourCastles", a four-team map (despite the fact that there are only teams of 2), "RedDesertRuins", a C-shaped canyon passage flanked left and right by high ground (a reminder that one of the four weapons that can deal damage is melee only, and that another one has an arc so steep you cannot fire up to the high ground from the lower ground), and "FortNight" is an almost coverless circle map with a single tower in the middle. The gamemodes are Deathmatch (kill for points), Team Deathmatch (kill for points, but assigned as teams with no friendly fire, but also no team coloration), Capture the Flag (run to collect the enemy "flag", a wooden flag mount with no flag and bring it back) and zombies (zombie npcs that cannot run and can only melee spawn and try and kill you and all other players, while you compete for most kills and least deaths).
All this is to say that Alternis has no variety.
Alternis has the movement keys, a fire button, a block/ironsights button, a crouch button, a third person button, a chat button, an emote button with four emotes, a run button, and a killbind as well as a scoreboard button. These are WASD, left mouse button, right mouse button, C, V, T, B, and K, with the scoreboard accessible by pressing TAB. The game will not tell you these keybinds, nor will it allow you to change them.
In every map, in fixed locations there are red crystals spawning. Running over one will heal you back to full. There is no health regeneration. There are no other pickups. This includes no pickups for weapons.
The ironsights button acts as the block button, and vice versa. This means that you will zoom in while blocking with the sword, and you will cause a block effect while aiming down sights with the revolver. The block does not fully negate damage at any point, even if the opposing player hits the sword only.
The Scoreboard tracks everything but players. So you can see which bot currently is winning, though you have no means of identifying the bot names as no names hover over playermodels and everyone looks the same. You will not know how well you do compared to bots, nor will you know which bot you killed as there is no kill feed.
The chat allows everyone to access cheats, that is noclip, spawn bots, kill bots, and setting player run speed and jump height. There is no command to give a player, or all players a specific weapon, to change the gamemode, or even to reset the scoreboard or kick a player.
The crouch button allows you to slide if you are running. The slide decelerates you within half a second to your normal speed and you cannot chain it. If you jump while running up a slope, you will gain jump height, and sliding before jumping increases that jump height. There is nothing to use that for, nor can you reach difficult ledges with it, as the maps are heavy on invisible walls and have little notable to reach.
The default respawn time is 3 seconds, starting from the frame you take lethal damage. Killing an enemy does not refill your health, and the game has no reservations about spawning you in the usual respawn point right next to the enemy trying to take a flag.
All this to say that Alternis has no quirks or interesting mechanics.
Alternis has a campaign mode not enabled, no matchmaking but also no server browser, no customization, no rankups, and matches do not have an end state of success, though the zombie mode has a game over state if all players die to the zombies in a wave, kicking everyone unceremoniously out of the server. Players are assigned teams randomly, and there is no team switching possible.
Alternis is not ready. Do not buy this game.
2/10 (no critical bugs, no physical harm risk).
