Ever feel as though people just don't award creativity these days? That for so long some great, innovative games went unnoticed thanks to a general lack of interest and poor publicity, games that on reflection, you often wish a sequel would follow even if you yourself missed out the first time around. I get the impression that regardless of Shattered Horizon's attempt to attain mainstream appeal by selecting a popular genre to break into, it too may find itself discarded and ignored like so many other games attempting something new and different have before it.

Although it's popularity may hinge on the fact it's being released in the same year - month in fact - as another highly popular First Person Shooter action game, and unless Futeremarks Games Studios intended to release Shattered Horizon with the words "2", "Warfare" and "Modern" in it's title, then it's success is far from certain. But at least this game has something going for it even that game can't claim to provide, an original and unique idea.

Events take place 40 years in the future where heavy mining of the Moon's vast and profitable resources has caused a cataclysmic accident and thrown billions of tons of rock into Earth's orbit. Two factions survived, the International Space Agency (ISA) and the Moon Mining Cooperative (MMC) but both remain stranded and unable to reach Earth, so they kill time by killing each other for control of strategic points littered throughout the debris now blocking their way home. A perfect excuse for some competitive online multiplayer action, but more than anything Shattered Horizon is a test of your skills at simply keeping alive in a harsh and unpredictable environment.

Lacking the comforts of gravity, every map in the game can be traversed and explored as thoroughly as you like. You float and spin and spiral from one end of the map to the next, and simple things such as moving forward requires some actual forward thinking as using thrusters propels you in which ever direction you wish to move until you either hit something, move in another direction or are killed by another player. That last part happens allot during your initial introduction, though movement itself never really feels overly difficult to grasp (though it does take some time perfecting) combat is for the most part a brief and deadly affair.

Space suite are extremely fragile and it rarely takes more than a few sustained hits before your corpse is flung off into the nether reaches of space. Headshots, close range knife attacks and a shot to your attached rocket boosters are also one hit kills, making the simple act of movement a rather perilous one. Given the nature of the games zero-gravity environments, there are few opportunities open for you to simply hide in a corner somewhere and camp until a target wanders by. It's a massive change of pace to other online action games, here getting a kill feels like an achievement simply because they're so difficult to attain, the sense of elation once you do finally add a notch to your leaderboard score is unsurpassed.

But the fact remains that this is a difficult game. A lack of any kind of tutorial or tooltips means the many of the first few matches you play will largely be spent wrestling with the controls and learning the various quirks, all while at the mercy of some players so well versed in the games complex control methods that they use you as pin cushion to expend their ammunition on. Once that initial difficulty curve is breached, Shattered Horizon's most interesting and rewarding game-play elements start to emerge.

Hit the "F" key and you'll activate the magnetic boots strapped to your feet, latching onto the nearest surface. This reduces your ability to move at speed but gains you a higher amount of accuracy when using the sniper scope and making it much easier to blast away at enemy spacemen floating by. Go one further and you can actually power down your suite completely, entering a Silent Running mode that essentially takes away all your on screen HUD, whilst also taking away your ability to actually hear what's going on around you. What it also gives you is that added edge against the enemy as you effectively remove yourself from their radar, the only way they or anyone else will be able to see you is with the naked eye, giving you a strong advantage to sneak up and gain an easy kill. It does carry it's own set of problems though, not least from the fact that entering this mode makes you invisible to your allies radar as well and increases the risk of friendly fire.

The games maps certainly give you ample opportunities to make use of this devious tactic. They're also superbly designed getting the balance of full blown sci-fi and realism just right, taking you from such locals as huge asteroids being hollowed out by giant burrowing machinery and even the remains of a partially destroyed International Space Station stuck in orbit as debris and free falling cargo containers spill out and float around it. Where it falls apart is in their lack of any real diversity, mainly taking you through spinning rocks and devastated space stations, it takes a while before you can actually distinguish each map from one another.

It all looks the part though, being that this is the first game from Futuremarks, a developer who has spent the past years designing programs to benchmark many of the PC's most powerful graphics cards, you'd expect nothing less. The stark wide open coldness of space is represented beautifully, with a huge partially hollowed out Moon and distant bright nebulas often glittering the background. It's certainly not pushing many graphical boundaries when it comes to fancy effects, but in a game like this, set in such a barren and dark environment, such effects may have lessened that feeling of actually being in space.

You will need a powerful graphics card to run it however, as Shattered Horizon doesn't support any card operating under Direct X 10 or operating systems other than Vista or the newly released Windows 7. Given that these days developers tend to be kinder to less tech savvy gamers by reducing their system specs to allow the widest possible audience to play, it's a bit of an odd decision to inflict such strict minimum requirements, particularly when this game really could have done with trying to appeal to the masses to ensure a packed server population. The results can already be felt, though the hard-core gamers will doubtfully have any problem matching those specs, they do tend to be the only ones on the lowly populated game servers at present, leading to games that tend to be sparse in player numbers.

A more fundamental problem comes with the lack of any kind of depth. This isn't a particularly big game, there's no attached single player campaign, weapons are limited to just the one assault rifle and a few grenades and maps are few in number, with only 4 in rotation. Together with a dwindling server population it's difficult to see how the game will maintain interest for those players it does have for the foreseeable future.

That's not to say Shattered Horizon is a game without merit, it's Zero-G combat is unique and interesting enough for it be lavished with praise, it's a game who's creativity does deserve to be rewarded, but in it's current state it remains difficult to recommend it to the wider public who will likely only view it at best with a sense of passing curiosity. With more content, a slightly less steep learning curve and less strict system requirements it'd have been a no brainer.

For those who do decide to have a look they will find a fun and creative online shooter, limited in scope and potential but with enough ideas of it's own to stand up to some of the other FPS currently out there, but with too little in the way of content it's still not a game I could recommend to the wider gaming world, perhaps if futermarks take what they've learnt here and hone those ideas they've presented in an expansion or sequel they could attain mainstream success, for now however it's difficult to see how Shattered Horizon will prevent itself from becoming yet another creative game resigned to the depths of obscurity.

Reviewed by Kieron Giacopazzi for AceGamez (All Rights Reserved).