FPS Ceator is a tool to allow even absolute beginners to make 3D first person shooters quickly and easily.

It is a bold claim, and, considering the huge array of game making ‘tools’ out there, one that is difficult to take seriously. Most game making tools are either very limited in what they allow you to do, or ridiculously complicated for a beginner.

FPS Creator has managed to break that mould - it really does allow you to make games very quickly and easily. It is virtually drag and drop game making.

There are limits to what you can do with the basic options, and if you have seen what the program can do, then you will likely recognise anything made in FPS creator when you see it, unless the designer made their own entities and used their own sounds, etc, but even so the results are impressive.

When you first start you are presented with an overview of your map. There are a number of pre-fabricated rooms you can drop onto the map, or you have the option of building the room yourself using individual elements such as floors and walls with different looks. You can also place items, furniture, weapons and NPCs in the rooms.

There are special items such as checkpoints, waypoints, trigger areas, portals and level endings that you can use to govern certain events within the game.

At the most basic level, the game handles sound, weapon firing, damage, etc for you - if you wanted to you could drag and drop a bunch of items onto the map, compile it, and have something playable straight away. If you have chosen to make an arena (multi-player) level it will even handle most of that for you also.

There are around 800 3D game objects to choose from, including 62 different enemies and 18 weapons by default. If you are knowledgeable about 3D modeling then it is possible to create / import your own models. You can also add your own sound effects. It is possible to create games with up to 50 levels.

By default sound is handled for you. It took me less than 10 minutes to get a level with multiple enemies, rooms, weapons, and interactable objects (boxes and chairs that could be moved around or picked up) working. You could hear footfalls when the player walked, and sounds when a weapon was fired. You even left bullet holes on the walls when you fired.

If you don't like the default handling of things, then there are scripting options which are also very easy to learn and give you a good degree of control. You can make traps / mines that trigger on certain types of behaviour, you can alter the AI of NPCs or instruct them to follow complex sets of waypoints, you can pretty much do anything you want.

The paper manual that comes with the CD is fairly short, but tells you everything you need to get up and running. If you want to do something more complicated then there is another manual on the CD which is a lot more in-depth.

In use, I found that even on a powerful system sometimes FPS creator became slow or sluggish, but considering the complexity of some of the maps I tried this is understandable. Rendering levels sometimes took several minutes on full detail, but was fairly quick with the settings turned down.

Games made with FPS creator are compiled into stand alone .exe files, and according to the web site you can give away or sell the games as you wish - no royalties, no lock in. This is something rare in the world of game making tools, and another thing in their favour.

This will not teach you to write games by yourself, but as a tool to create first person shooters and multi-player deathmatch games it is very well done. It gives non-programmers a chance to see their ideas come to life, and game designers could use it to show off their ideas for levels. The results are impressive, and its simplicity is amazing.

You can buy FPS creator from their web site.