Fursan al-Aqsa: The Knights of the Al-Aqsa Mosque® is a shooter game. A shooter game that promises a realistic take on the Israeli-Palestine conflict. I warn you, fellow gamer, that is a gigantic lie.

Sometimes, it wants to be a stealth game. Sometimes it is a shooter game. Sometimes, it is both at the same time. But it is never good. And it never reaches the heights of games it shamelessly admits to stealing from, such as Metal Gear Solid or Max Payne. Developed by a single developer, my expectations were fairly low as I know that game development is a hard and challenging process. Sadly, even those expectations got undermined faster than Palestine’s claim for independence.

Running on a very outdated UE3, developed on a PC that could barely run the game at 30 FPS (author’s note: developer’s words), you precisely get that: a game that barely functions. The core mechanics are there, the guns do indeed fire, jumping does lead to a gaining of upwards momentum and crouching makes your hitbox smaller (I think). On top of these somewhat working mechanics are sticked questionable design choices that I do not understand even after finishing all nine missions.

Aiming down sights only zooms in the camera, there is no actual iron sight. Switching to first person camera does not give any actual increase in accuracy, only restricts your FOV. Double jump is implemented for weird platforming sections (realism, remember?). Bullet time stolen from Max Payne is useful only for cheesing encounters or increasing your jump height. Wannabe stealth is non-existent as the knife does precisely zero damage except for when you get the lucky stealth kill prompt. This list could possibly go on, but it would never be enough properly represent what a steaming pile of crap this game is and therefore it is better to demonstrate this on an actual example.

Mission 2 places you into a small Zionist (people who support the Jews being in Israel and Palestine territory) base. Objectives are surprisingly simple: kill everyone, blow up a bunch of things, steal a military drone. Oh, but do not worry my dear reader, nothing is as elementary. The enemies will be least of your worries, as you will have to learn positioning of all the security cameras guarding the premises. These cameras, if they do decide to spot you, lead to an instant fail. You might argue that this mechanic is implemented in a lot of games. The crux lies in the fact that Fursan has no checkpoint system, therefore you will redo the mission every single time a random camera decides it wants to detect you.

So, you dealt with the cameras, however as you scout the small camp, you run into another issue. Enemies almost magically spot you across the entire level and unload an entire magazine into your fragile separatist body, essentially killing you instantly. And that will happen more often than you think. Random enemy will just shoot you across the map, you being none the wiser to their actual position. Stealth does not make sense, because evil Zionists have no real radius to their FOV. And so, with the camera mechanics and enemies having the vision of a world-class surgeon, this game will change from a TPS/FPS into a Simon Says game of memorizing every single item, enemy, camera placement.

But do not fret my fellow Jihadist, there are ways to combat this unfairness, at least to some extent. Firstly, headshots (if the game decides to register them) regenerate some of your health. That means that it is almost necessary to abuse the bullet time to score these headshots to ensure your survival against enemies that are guilty of aimbotting.

Each level has at least one spawn point for medkits that also refill a bit of your health. Important thing to note is that these respawn after a short period, therefore if you need to, just stand on top them and fully heal.

Finally, there are body armour spawns that are only one time pick-ups. They always give you extra 50 health and cannot be stacked.

The before mentioned objectives essentially repeat over and over in different variants: instead of picking up C4 and blowing something up, pick up a civilian and deliver him to an ambulance. Sometimes you get to face a mini-boss of sorts, who is usually either a giant bullet sponge of a general, who finally dies after having approximately 100 bullets unloaded into his head (again reminding you: realism) or a helicopter that forgot how a helicopter works and clips into a tight street only to freak out, spin like a maniac, crash into a ground and then mercilessly chase you across Jerusalem.

The monotony of the missions is broken up by two things. Sometimes you get to experience super janky cutscene which do make you laugh, but that is about it. Main character pulls moves from Matrix, slices people with the dull side of the blade or catapults from a fighter jet only to shoot a helicopter with an RPG. The B-movie vibe of the cutscenes is most definitely the best part of the game and make me think that the dev should’ve gone to make an animated series on YouTube instead of this sorry attempt at a video game.

The second breath of (almost) fresh air is a tank mission. The tank controls horrendously, the aiming does not work if the tank is under an angle, human enemies have minigun rocket launchers (unless this is a government secret weapon, I question once more the realism) and the final waves of helicopters and fighter jets look more like a drunk clown fiesta than an actual threat.

The final point that makes this game an absolute torture to get through, is the soundtrack. The individual tracks are fine, however the implementation ruins absolutely everything. For each mission, there is one track that plays on repeat until you finish the mission. And if you were reading carefully, you will play each mission for quite some time. The only saving grace is that you can turn off the music in the pause menu. And after your 50th attempt at Mission 5, you will be gladly turning off the music as your brain will slowly be melting from the looping middle eastern pop music.

The story is a confusing mess, that you won’t understand even after watching the final cutscene, staring into the blackness of an Episode 2 announcement screen. The one best thing about this game is the sense of relieve and dread I felt when I finished the game but saw that there will be more. After having finished Episode 1, I can only sit here, waiting for more. It turned into a weird sado-masochistic relationship of me never wanting to turn a game like this on ever again but needing to see what other madness this developer will pump out.

I, in my best judgement, cannot recommend this game to anyone who wants to play a good realistic shooter. I cannot recommend this to anyone who has money to spare, because you will never get your money’s worth, unless you are into mental torture. Who can I recommend this game to? To myself, because I will be back once the remake (which is crazy to think about) and Episode 2 release to review them. This is my sacrifice for the greater good to achieve martyrdom and my rightful place in Allah’s heaven alongside 40 virgins.

PC specs

CPU: Intel Core i5 10400F
GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 Super
RAM: 8GB
Resolution: 1920 x 1080
Performance: 240FPS with everything on high

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