By Andrew Min
I’ve always been a fan of sidescrollers, ever since I got my first GameBoy with Super Mario Bros. on it. I’ve played them all, from Soldat to Super Tux. But I never experienced anything quite like Teeworlds, an open source multiplayer sidescrolling shoot-’em-up game.
Note: You may have heard of Teeworlds under its former name, Teewars. Rest assured, it’s the same thing.
What the heck is Teeworlds?
Teeworlds has a basic yet unique premise. First of all it’s sorta like a first person shooter, except that it’s a sidescroller. That is, it uses FPS controls, yet has fights on sideview worlds similar to Soldat. Picture a sidescroller where the people are all Kirby lookalikes and fight with pistols, shotguns, rocket launchers, swords, and wooden mallets. Teeworlds is also unique in that there is no single player mode. It’s all multiplayer, which saved the developers the trouble of creating both a story and an AI. Since Teeworlds is licensed under the GPL, developers have ported it to Windows, OS X, and Linux (for the last, it’s also available in many of the repositories).
Setting up Teeworlds
When you open Teeworlds, you will be presented with a list of servers (if not, go to the Internet tab). You can also play on LAN, but you’ll need someone on your LAN to host a server for you. Since that’s out of the scope of this article, go over to the Settings tab. The first subtab lets you configure your player. You can change your name (Nameless Tee is kinda boring), your tee’s color (this won’t be affected on team games), your tee’s skin, and a bunch of other options. In the Controls subtab, you can change all your keyboard controls. For now however, it’s better to leave them at their defaults. Under Network, the only option is the Remote Console password. Since I won’t be explaining how to set that up in this article, you don’t have to worry about that. The Graphics subtab is much more useful. Here, you can toggle fullscreen, graphics quality, and much more. Finally, the Sound subtab lets you turn on sounds and change the sound volume.
Shooting, grappling, malleting, and otherwise harassing other tees
Now that you’ve configured your settings, go back to the Internet tab. You can sort the servers by several fields: Name, Type (DM, Deathmatch, TDM, Team Deathmatch, and CTF, Capture the Flag), Map, Players, Version, and Ping. I personally prefer sorting by Type since I dislike DM. You may also notice that some servers have a padlock to the left of their name. This means that that server requires a password. To join a server, highlight the name of the map and click Connect. You will then automatically join the map.
The gameplay is remarkable simple (it’s not one of those complex first person shooter type games). You start with a hammer and a grappling hook, but you can also pick up a pistol, shotgun, or a rocket launcher. To shoot the gun (or hit with the mallet), use a left click, and to shoot your grappling hook, hold down on the right click. The grappling hook is the most effective way to get around, but it takes a lot of time to get used to (you need to find a place to hook onto, shoot the hook, pray that it lands, and use your movement keys to swing through the air Tarzan-style).
As noted above, there are three different types of games in Teeworlds. The first (and most popular) is Deathmatch. You get a weapon and fend for yourself. I personally never liked this type of game, but then I’m more of a teamwork and objectives based player. Then there’s Team Deathmatch, where your team’s job is to kill the other team. Finally, there’s Capture the Flag, which has a complex scoring system where capturing the flag is much more important than killing (see http://www.teeworlds.com/?page=docs&id=165 for more on the scoring system).
The verdict
In conclusion, Teeworlds is a really fun game. Whether you’re an avid FPS player, a side-scroller maniac, or just a casual gamer looking to have some fun, Teeworlds is a great play. Note: Dawning Valley is not responsible for any incidents regarding you, your boss or spouse, and Teeworlds.
Rating: 5/5
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