Alien Arena is a free, open-source first-person shooter built around the CRX engine, an open-source, Quake-based engine. It features a fast-paced gameplay taking place in a Sci Fi universe over dozens of maps. Alien Arena provides both single-player and multi-player modes.
According to the official website,
Alien Arena is a furious frag fest with arenas ranging from the small, to the massive. With a large built-in player base, it’s never hard to find a good match going on, at any hour of the day. The community is friendly, as well as prolific. Dozens of maps, models, and various accessories have been created by community members to add on to the game experience.
Gameplay
The game takes place over environments set in a futuristic universe. There are 10 weapons and 7 game modes: Deathmatch, CTF, All Out Assault, Deathball, Team Core Assault, Cattle Prod and Duel. Besides these, there is also the Tactical mod, which can be played on a single map, Tac-Exterminator.
The available weapons and default bindings are:
- Minderaser – keybind 0
- Blaster – keybind 1
- Alien Disruptor – keybind 2
- Pulse Rifle – keybind 3
- Flame Thrower – keybind 4
- Rocket Launcher – keybind 5
- Alien Smartgun – keybind 6
- Disruptor – keybind 7
- Alien Vaporizer – keybind 8
- Violator – keybind 9
Weapons have an alternate fire (right-click) mode like the scope
Multi-player
Multi-player offers an online server browser to choose the game you wish to join. Generally you can find a few servers with real users playing.
One of the nice things is that once you join or host an online game you will be automatically connected to the IRC server irc.planetarena.org and notified of users joining or leaving the chat channel #alienarena. You can enable or disable this feature in options.
Online server
Single-player
The single-player mode takes you over a series of maps where you play against bots in a team.
Configuration
Alien Arena offers plenty of configuration options. You can change resolution, graphical details, audio settings, run in windowed or fullscreen mode, configure mouse and keyboard.
All the configuration options can be set inside the autoexec.cfg config file, which should be located inside $HOME/.codered/arena. Once you enter your custom settings in this file, it will be automatically executed when Alien Arena starts. To execute it manually, open the console and type /exec autoexec.cfg. Take a look at $HOME/.codered/arena/config.cfg to see a list of variables, however, don’t edit this file.
Alien Arena: Tactical
This version of Alien Arena also includes an alpha demo of Alien Arena: Tactical, a new game scheduled for the spring of 2014.
Installation in Ubuntu/Mint
Ubuntu 13.04 comes by default with Alien Arena 7.53, which is an older release, however you can install the latest version by compiling from source.
Step #1. Download the source package from the official website (direct link)
Step #2. Uncompress the tarball
In a terminal, change the current working directory to the one where you saved the package (e.g. $HOME/Downloads) and type:
Step #3. Install the needed dependencies
Type the following commands in a terminal to install the development tools and dependencies:
Step #4. Compile and install
Change the working directory to the source directory (e.g. alienarena-7.66).
To install as normal user, use:
make
make install
Alien Arena will be installed as $HOME/usr/bin/alienarena.
To install as root, system-wide, use:
make
sudo make install
Official trailer
Resources
