Not only do you have to kill to keep your points up, but you must find out who has the balls and eliminate them before they have a chance to score. The problem? There is only one set, which means that all of you are looking at once. The final event (and my favorite) is the Ballblast event, which fills an arena with colored balls, which must be captured, and then shot through special holes in the arena. The Speedblast event has you running through mazes and obstacle courses in order to find seven flags before your competitors - it's short and sweet, but a fun diversion from the tournament fights. Though you can usually win by killing everything that walks, crawls, or moves, the smart players will head for the #1 player, who grants a whopping 1,000 points (an average player only give 250).

You don't win a level with kills, but by scoring points, which can be gathered by taking out high-ranking competitors, and finding special targets hidden around the level. The Pointblast gives you a straightforward arena experience, with one major difference - points. Skycrapers are just around the corner from asteroid battles, and moon-top Nerfing is right next to the standard nerf arena. Like UT, Nerf isn't limited by a plot per se, which means that the arenas are only separated by the designer's imagination - the Seqouia arena has you jumping through trees and swimming through caverns, while the Orbital arena takes place on a space station, complete with anti-gravity and an airlock.

Each arena is then split into three distinct games (Pointblast, Speedblast, and Ballblast), with bonus rounds included for high scores in certain arenas. The game is structured like a giant obstacle course/gameshow, with different arenas providing you with a variety of formats to test your skills. It's a classic (I suppose we can say that now) first-person shooter done better than most of its competitors, and ups the ante by actually having the Nerf to rethink tournament play, instead of simply taking the existing formula and tagging on the Nerf label. If you've been reading our previews, you know what a big surprise this game was to us when Stephen brought the game back to the offices and one by one, got us all addicted to it. Not only is this game not just for kids, but it's a challenging and exciting shooter rivaling any 'adult' action game on the market this year. Not only did Nerf Arena Blast beat Unreal Tournament and Quake III to the punch, but it delivers a tournament experience that is just as incredible (and in some ways, more original) as everything promised by the two powerhouses. If the pen is mightier than the sword (which, if you're willing to experiment, is true with around 35% of rollerball pens and 27% of ballpoint pens, according to an informal IGNPC survey), then a Nerf missile must be at least twice as fast as a fraggable bullet.

Nerf arena blast demo release date