Form three groups, if you please. If you have no interest in games, you’re on the right – heading to the next review with extreme alacrity. Group 2, by the exits please, with copies of Unreal Editor and knowledge of what Mip-Mapping is – but don’t head out just yet.

Everyone else, pay close attention. Just about every game on the market now ships with an editor, and if you’ve spent any time with them, two things should be immediately obvious: FPS Creator is far behind the pack in terms of tools and technology, but a great deal easier to actually sit down and start making games with. A blueprint-styled map editor builds your worlds, with a series of scripts and triggers working behind the scenes to turn them from one-off levels into full games. If you can use a mouse, you can create a game, which you can sell or give away without paying licensing or royalties.

Out of the box, you’re restricted to fairly simple shooters with poor AI, and only two settings for your game: sci-fi and WW2. FPS Creator gets past these limitations by allowing you to build on this, importing your own objects, characters and textures, then scripting them to do whatever you want them to.

FPS Creator has only just been released and, unsurprisingly, all the demos out at the moment are fairly simple affairs. However, longer-term, the amount of control that you get over games, and the smaller scripts and ideas already being generated on the main forum, make it one of those rare creation tools that leaves you keen to see what the community is going to do with it, especially with the promise of source-code releases, DarkBASIC integration, and DLL based plug-ins in the future. Until then, FPS Creator sits comfortably between the two major stools – entertaining enough to splash around with, with the power to cater for your rising ambition.