An interesting mix of a third person shooter with RPG elements coupled with an ever changing world dictated by plays with both a Free-To-Play (FTP) and Pay-2-Play (P2P) model, Global Agenda brings on a striking amount of comparisons to other games within its genre, namely Team Fortress 2. A large and ambitious project considering this is Hi-Rez's first game release. But how does the game stack up on its own?

Title: Global Agenda
Platform: PC
Developer: Hi-Rez Studios
Publisher: Hi-Rez Studios
Released: February 1, 2010

Story
Looking for lore? Trash that idea, there is none worth mentioning. Your character is a tube grown clone bred to take the place of some high ranking Recon of some large corporation known as The Commonwealth that controls most of the world. You kill this Recon in the tutorial level, fight through a city of robots, listen to some extremely gruff half-man half-machine guy talk about nothing then you just sit in a city hub and can jump to either straight PvP or PvE. That is all that is there and there is little to no motivation to look into it any further.

Gameplay
The game is broken up into 4 main class types, each with talent trees that can be specialized into while leveling up. Global Agenda covers the bases with most of the general class types done through other class based shooters. The Assault class for the big guns like rockets and grenade launches, the Medic for healing and poisons, the Recon for sniping and stealth melee kills and the Robotics, whom for the life of me I cannot stop calling “Engie,” who builds turrets and other support items for his team.

The PvE is broken up into 4 player “run-and-shoot-everything” areas that you can either be tosses into with a random group of people from the main towns hub or with a few friends of yours that increase in difficulty through selected tiers. The PvE, though simple, becomes repetitive quickly and is lackluster to say the least. It it simply there to grind for the materials required for crafting. The crafting system give you temporary stat boost to your character but without a way to renew the items once they break, they leave you lacking and you are sometimes just better off not bothering with it.

The PvP is the heart and soul of the game. Being broken up into two main chunks, the PvP can either be arena combat play between two ten-player teams beating the snot out of eachother for control points, pushing a cart Payload style or even having one team attack while another team defends points. Its here where you'll get your most bang for your buck out of the game. However, there is no option to join a queue into a selected game type that you'd like to go into. All games are made at random with random players unless you join a team with some friends of yours. A bit of a turn off and I'd hope there would be something improved in this area.

The second cut of PvP is in the Conquest mode which requires the monthly $12 subscription in order to participate. This mode is specifically just for Agencies to fight eachother in. An Agency is the same as a Clan, Guild or other system of that type. These Agencies then fight for territory against other Agencies in a never ending brawl for supremacy of world domination set at certain times of the day to better suit your timezone.

The Looks
Though the max level is 50, you stop gaining skills at 30 so everything afterwards is purely for cosmetics and flair. And boy is there a ton of flair. Each and every single armor set, helmet, accessory and color that you can toss onto your character are purely for cosmetic uses currently with little plan to make armors mean anything. However, they sure as hell made sure that your characters will look cool and unique to their class. The Assault rolling with large heavy armor, Robotic with claw arm and medium armor, Medic with an obscene amount of liquids flowing through tubes and Recon with small tight suits each tailored to the players individual style.

Being on the Unreal 3 engine, though, the world itself doesn't look as fantastic as other games I've seen ran on the engine like Gears of War. The textures are very plain by todays standards and the environments are not detailed to any degree, save for the large backgrounds of islands and mountains. These are designs we'd see in older shooter games dating back to Counter-Strike.

Verdict – 7.5/10
The game can start out fun initially and can last you a good amount of hours with the out of the box purchase but it was released incomplete. There seem to be daily server crashes, an unfinished crafting system and main city hub, lack of desire to pay the monthly fee to even do the Conquest mode and no features to be able to pick and choose the PvP that you'd like to do, this game won't last the test of time. Within the coming months there are going to have to be some updates to levitate these issues. At least it makes for a decent team based shooter until then.