Open World Action game Triad Wars has recently opened up its doors to the public and so we’ve decided to head back Hong Kong to see just what’s changed since our last try out in closed beta. The game itself is a free to play open world sandbox meets territory building strategy where you get to become a fearsome triad gang member and work your way up to be an influential boss. Developed by the United Front Games, Triad Wars is the other side of the coin to single player game Sleeping Dogs, where players take on the role as an undercover cop and infiltrate the Chinese Triad, this time round players will be the bad guys themselves without and excused; your goal in the game is to setup your own criminal empire, fight the police and go up against rival gangs.

The details of the game and core concepts haven’t changed much since our first look review of the game, so we’ll not go over all the details again, Closed Beta very much seems to have been about ironing out kinks, bugs and excruciating disconnects that plagued the game before with much of the main content being the same… for better or for worse. Stepping back into the game we carried on with our previous account at a relatively low level 4, albeit that’s still a good few hours game play, though one of the changes since closed beta is an increased level 50 cap.

Logging in the first thing we did was spend some of the gold we’d been provided, premium currency that let us buy a few things from the shop (we didn’t have so much that we could go nuts so couldn’t test out all the top of the range cars, etc.) What we did buy was a couple of booster packs, particularly weapon packs that let us add new gear to our inventory; these are the same cards that players can pick up by doing the appropriate missions in the open world, but they’re quicker to get and gives a guaranteed rare item. It’s not really pay to win because the world missions generally aren’t too difficult anyway, albeit picking up an “Infinite Ammo” for 24 hours card did make the back end of our game time a bit of a game changer.

Putting around six hours into the game we have to say that we’re actually pretty happy with the game, though by no means deep into things, from what we’ve seen and read it does feel like the game is still lacking a bit of depth and may start to suffer from repetitiveness. Each individual component is fun; building up your own territory is the strategy aspect and a place to input your money, but it only requires a small amount of attention, the linear story driven element is a little on the short and infrequent side, but what is available is enjoyable. The missions themselves are fast paced and fun, but unfortunately without any narrative they start to feel quite tedious after a while, doing a shakedown and chasing an NPC, or beating up some guys to steal their ride and then get away as you’re chased, taking down a group of armed gang rivals… these feel like the only quests we ever really see over and over.

The issue really is that if you want to take a break from quests then you have the open world content, very Grand Theft Auto you get to walk around, beat up pedestrians, steal cars, do drive-bys, ramming people off the road, driving up pavements and running down the innocent, randomly putting a meat cleaver into a passing policeman’s head, unloading your machine gun into a passing car… it’s all fun (albeit extremely brutal), but there’s only so long it can be fun for. Combined with this is that it’s not only still relatively the same content as the missions, but there’s not really any rewards for it; you can kill pedestrians but you can’t mug them for money, you can steal a top of the line care but you can’t turn it in for cash if it’s not for a mission. Plenty of shops and vendors around but all they do is cower if you pull out a weapon, no way to rob them, the only real interactive element is the police getting involved and then you get to have huge firefights and care chases.

Don’t get us wrong, this part of the game shines really well, and the longer you are wanted by the police and don’t fully evade their attention, the more points and prizes you can start to rack up. The combat is a little tricky at times, often accidentally pulling off maneuvers that we couldn’t then replicate, such as when we were in a firefight with the riot police unloading machine guns on us and we got a hostage and used them as a human shield as we aimed our pistol (which was amazing as the riot police stopped firing and started moved from cover to cover trying to reposition and get a better shot on me). Being in a vehicle is more than just driving around, you get to fire from your vehicle at passers by, into the cab of other vehicles, ram them off the road, or shoot out their wheels in a pursuit to make them flip.

Individually everything is done well, when it all comes together it’s a great game, we found ourselves going off on killing sprees more than doing the missions and getting constantly distracted, but it does feel like the shelf life might be shorter than we’d like. More so, and probably our biggest point of contention, is that it doesn’t really feel like an online game, at least not what we were expecting. The open sandbox world is a single player environment, though you find other players hideouts and attack their bases, working through the defenses that they have set up, and (somehow) we experienced an ambush where NPCs popped up that belonged to another player whilst we were walking through a market and got into a shootout with them, there’s still no real player to player engagement. There’s plenty of games where this is the case, most traditionally Base Defense/Empire Building RTS games where you might build a castle and an army and send them to attack troops for the AI to simply work out who is the victor without both players fighting at the same time… unfortunately for Triad Wars it feels like something is missing because of it. Definitely worth a try but we do hope there are some fundamental changes coming down the line.

SCORE:

• Graphics: 8


• Gameplay: 7


• Performance: 9

• Pros: Top graphics and performance, exciting car chases and combat, dynamic battles and use of environment.


• Cons: Open sandbox content can be repetitive, not much player to player interaction.

Rating: 8

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