Once there was this game called Quake. Quake was immensly popular and had an enourmous fan base. It was THE game to play. This was back in 1995. It's the year 2005 now and we're still feeling the aftermath of Quakes impact. Cube is a 3D first person shooter directly inspired by Quake.

Cube plays much like a conventional FPS. You have your shotty, machine gun, rifle (or a modded railgun, like me) and rocket launcher. You run around in arenas, either challenging other players online or monsters in the single player mode. Your aim: to score as many frags as you can . Some might complain about a lack of innovation or originality, but I say if it aint broken, don't fix it.

Of course, in many ways Cube isn't conventional. Primarily this is an FPS built on top of a terrain rendering engine, instead of the other way around. What does that mean? Well, to say the least: great looking maps. For a game that is only 20 megabytes, Cube is pretty. The engine draws up amazing Egyptian temples and Haunted Castles with ease, dynamically lighting them to your hearts content.

When we stop looking at the nice walls and textures, however, we are greeted with some not so nice models. Cube suffers in this department. All of the models that come with cube look mediocre and out of place when put with the terrain. Personally i'm holing out for a future version where these are improved on, particularly the player model, which is by far the most disgusting looking of them all.

The sounds in cube are average and none are out of place. What gets me, though, is the music. If you play the single player maps you won't be dazzled by anything all that amazing, but as soon as you load up a multiplayer map, you get hit hard and fast by one of the many great heavy metal tracks that come packaged with Cube. Put together by Marc A. Pullen (a.k.a Fanatic), these songs are exactly the drug it takes to get you engrossed in Cubes' splendour.

Cube is very customizable. Almost everything involved in this game can be changed in one of the 100's of text documents that form the body of its engine. Even better, the community is always designing new skins, maps, and sounds to help improve your personal Cube experience. Some of you might notice from the screenshots that I have done away with the default weapons and items scattered throughout the maps for ones I feel capture the essence of this game much more effectively. You'll be able to do just the same :D

Finally, this game comes with a built in map editor, and a good one at that. You'll find information on how to use it scattered throughout the net and in the Cube directory. Easy to use and effective, this helps to increase the game's life span incredibly. The active players you'll meet in online play are always designing new maps. Most likely, you'll even get the opportunity to help them with their next masterpiece in the co-op editing mode.

Cube is a great freeware game, and a brilliant fan made successor to Quake. With its sequel well in the works we can expect to see amazing improvements on this great game.