I don’t think the FPS genre will ever get old. And now we got ourselves another one—that is, Police Infinity, released just a few days ago on Steam Early Access for Windows and—to my pleasant surprise—Linux. The game utilizes the Unity engine and is developed/published by 314 Arts, an indie company based in Germany. Not very often do we get a day-one Linux release. Awesome.

I got to play a brief ten-to-fifteen minutes of deathmatch with one of the developers and some other dude before I had to restart the game to lower the texture quality, but in a nutshell, the gameplay is pretty reminiscent to Counter-Strike, Police versus Terrorists, being equipped with a primary weapon, a secondary, a knife that has a quick jab and a strong one, one frag, one smoke, and one flashbang. Multiplayer modes include Deathmatch/Team Deathmatch, Demolition (Capture and Hold), and Search and Destroy, the last of which is the emphasis of the game, although I don’t know what it’s about (it’s even disabled at the moment due to player spawning issues). Four maps are included; another two will be added this month, and three new weapons in addition to the six already included (four assault rifles, one sniper rifle, and one handgun).

I like the plans they’re putting out there:

The big idea behind police infinity is to have one game that we will expand in all directions (MP, competetive / coop, Story, Tactics, etc). . The early access release version of the game will only include the normal multiplayer part and it will slowly be expanded in all kinds of genres. Therefore the ‘Infinity’.

But, I’m not going to snap the buckle to my seatbelt just yet, as there are often delays regarding these kinda things, and just about as often they don’t even make it into the final product. Either that, or the game stays in early access indefinitely.

Graphics are pretty decent, sound effects are great, and the gameplay itself is pretty solid. What stands out to me is the animations. There’s no evidence that these were half-hearted attempts; this is pure German quality put to work here. There’s this one reload stance where the dude twirls the clip into the air before he catches and jams it into the socket on the weapon.

The unique thing about this game, though? To be frank, I can’t really answer that at this point. I don’t know. What I do know is, it’s got some issues, as one would expect from early access.

The first thing that comes to mind is trying to join a server. Sometimes I have to triple-click or click 6 or 7 times before the game finally starts to connect. And nine out of ten times, the game will hang upon trying to connect. Apparently it’s some sort of Network Address Translation (NAT) issue. Your average Joe ain’t gonna know how to open up NAT on his router, and this shouldn’t even be an issue in the first place. I hope this’ll get fixed in the next update.

Next, the audio is muted by default. Then, if under the unusual circumstance where you actually do enter a server successfully, performance is meh. I had to turn the texture quality down to medium and even then the framerate can drop as low as 20 FPS. I recommend using a GTX 960 or above if you want to try this at 1080p on high texture quality (the system requirements aren’t even listed on the Store page). Finally, as with many new games, player count is low—you have to arrange a certain time to play that others can agree with in order to get in on the action.

I believe this game could have great potential, but I recommend holding on to your wallets at least until the next update comes out, where we should be expecting:

Two new maps

Three new weapons

Bots!

Bug fixes/optimization

One of the developers has stated the bots, at least, should be out in “the next few days.” So let’s see how this game evolves over the next twelve months or so.

EDIT 5/3: minor grammar corrections