Are social games finally starting to move forward?

Social games are something that have started to explode over the last few years. Games such as Farmville and Bejeweled gained huge popularity through the medium of Facebook, and as a result Zynga, Farmvilles creator, is now worth over $1 billion. With Facebook having over 800 million members it's certainly starting to attract the attention of game developers.

While the games are often played by thousands of people, it's an area I haven't really payed much attention to. It seemed to me like every game released was either a game similar to Farmville, or something along the lines of Evony. Imagine my surprise when browsing online today and I discovered Überstrike.

Überstrike is a first person shooter developed by Cmune Games and is played directly through Facebook in your browser. While I have usually just passed over social games I decided that this was certainly worth a look. When first loading the game you are met by a tutorial as with most games. The only downside I have with this during the tutorial you are unable to change any of your settings during it. This includes both your graphics options and controls, so if the sensitivity is wrong there isn't much you can do, also if your PC is struggling to run the game then you have to wait until after the tutorial to change it. With there being no indication that you can change options this could put players off early as a lot of people on Facebook don't have amazing systems.

Being a Facebook game, it is free to play and allows for purchases with both in game and real money currencies. The cost of purchases with real money are quite extreme. I was taking a look at weapons and found a Sniper Rifle that costs $30.00 to buy, sadly it also one-shots enemies players if they don't have armor without hitting them in the head. The weapon was only available to be purchased through real money as well.

The game play is quite decent, however being a browser game it seems to suffer from some input lag, which affects the play of the game. Some of the maps are pretty poor too, one of them I played just seemed to be random boxes and jump pads thrown into a giant room, and when I say Giant I mean giant. The only way to tell which team the player you are shooting at is on, is by a health bar above their head. This is only visible when you are quite close, so on the previously mentioned map you couldn't actually tell who was on your team even when zoomed in with the sniper. At max range on the map the cross hair on the sniper is the size of a player, meaning an accurate shot of the head is difficult. This is a problem as all other weapons just seemed useless on the map unless you ran around the bottom of the map hoping for someone to spawn near you.

Overall the game is fairly average, and appears to be a pay to win shooter. This is something I would expect to see on a Facebook game, however it is good to see the platform finally starting to evolve. I will keep checking back on social games to see if anything else is changing within the market. At over 800 million users on Facebook it makes sense that people are starting to move towards the platform, and we already see a lot of integration with Facebook among games right now. Ijji already connects with your Facebook account and uses it to log in to their games. Combining games with Facebook and the mobile platforms is something I expect to see a lot of in the future, even if it's not the full game but something similar to Warcrafts auction house application. The future is looking good for the social platform, and it's also looking interesting for gamers too.