Red Eclipse is a free, open-source shooter based on the Cube 2 engine, the engine on which two other popular games, AssaultCube and Sauerbraten, are based. The game was initially launched on March 15, 2011, and the latest release, Red Eclipse 1.4, was put out on March 22, 2013.
The game comes with over 50 maps, and several well-known game modes like Deathmatch, Deathball or CTF. You can also choose from a high number of mutators, which will change the way a mode behaves. The weapons include an alternate fire too (when right-clicking) and various interesting weapons like the sword for melee combat. You will have to press E to pick up weapons when you’re near them, you don’t pick them up automatically.
Under the motto “a free, casual, arena shooter”, Red Eclipse includes a single-player mode with bots, however the main focus stays on the online multi-player side. There are several servers that you can find on the online browser which have real players.
Erosion
One of the gameplay features is that you can jump once, and then press Space again to further jump (propel) for a longer distance in any direction, including up. The default gravity seems to have a low value, and jumping gives a feeling of flying calmly, being pretty slow and relaxing. You can propel for as long as you have stamina, which regenerates pretty quickly. If that is the case, when killing an enemy, assists will be mentioned too (e.g. the console will specify the both the name of the fragger and the teammate that helped in killing the opponent).
Spectating mode provides the so-called SpecTV, which automatically shows various parts of the map with using a moving camera. This is quite a nice feature.
SpecTV
The background music is pretty nice, however the in-game sounds are not particularly impressive, especially the sounds made by the weapons which could be a little improved.
Configuration options are pretty similar to the ones that can be found in Sauerbraten. The configuration also allows to edit the autoexec.cfg file in-game. You can change resolution, graphics effects, sound and input settings, as well as directly edit the autoexec.cfg configuration file.
The good things about Red Eclipse are its unique features and game style. Since it’s actively developed and pretty complete, Red Eclipse has a lot of potential.
There are installation packages for Linux, Windows and Mac OS X. For Linux, just download the archived package, uncompress it and run the redeclipse.sh script to start it.
Official Trailer
Screenshots
Resources
Chandler Bailey says: I have played this and it runs very well on my older PC! Lots of fun with cool gameplay and controls. I highly recommend giving it a shot.
Nick says: Brilliant game! One thing that’s often missed or overlooked is the built in map editor. You can edit maps online with other players, and even play them while you build (which i think is the best feature).
