Cauldron HQ
| Cauldron HQ | ||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 There's nothing good about this Cauldron.
| ||||||||||
|
Cauldron HQ is a game developer located in Bratislava, Slovakia. The studio was founded in 1996 with their first project, Quadrax being released in the same year. According to the official website, Cauldron HQ currently has 64 employees divided into 2 separate teams. Cauldron is also responsible for the creation of the Cloak Engine in 2001 which at the time was considered the best on the market, the engine was later renamed to the CloakNT engine.
In 2008, the company was working on various games for the History Channel, published by Activision Value. They are known for developing most of the Cabela's hunting games, also published by Activision, from a period from 2009 to 2014, when the entire Cabela's video game franchise appeared to end. Cauldron was also known for making Soldier of Fortune: Payback.
As of 2014, Bohemia Interactive quietly announced that Cauldron has been acquired and decided to integrate into a new branch called "Bohemia Interactive Slovakia" and is responsible for incorporating the animal and hunting mechanics into the game. David Durčák (Development Director) resulting Cauldron HQ and most of it's service being shutdown and left abandoned, The website is still active but most games are not available.
Why It's Not a Good Cauldron
- Most of their games tends to be rushed, without any given reason, resulting in being nothing but a bunch of shovelware titles.
- They killed the Soldier of Fortune franchise with their horrible game in the series Soldier of Fortune: Payback.
- Some of their PC Ports tend to be bad as they lack graphical settings and most importanly V-Sync option.
- Without V-Sync enabled to lock the framerate at 60FPS the games will not let you shoot enemies, so instead you have to enable it via Graphic Card: Control Panel.
- Their console ports aren't any better as they sometimes suffer from low framerates mostly going up to 20FPS.
- Their games usually have really bad voice acting.
- Their in-game engine: CloakNT is very outdated making most of their games have terrible graphics or subpar.
- The two games The History Channel: Civil War – A Nation Divided and Secret Service: Ultimate Sacrifice for some reason dont have an PlayStation 3 port despite there being an Xbox 360 port and an PlayStation 2 port.
- Most of their games are known for having Artificial Difficulty: As the enemy A.I can range from being too stupid to incredibly unfair.
- There isn't much story to follow in their games.
- For some reason they didn't bother to release Jurassic: The Hunted on PC, despite being released on multiple consoles.
- They released a bunch of bad games such as Soldier of Fortune: Payback, Chaser, The History Channel: Battle for The Pacific, The History Channel: Civil War – A Nation Divided and Secret Service: Ultimate Sacrifice.
Redeeming Qualities
- They did released some good games such as: History Civil War: Secret Missions, Knights of the Temple II, Gene Troopers, Jurassic: The Hunted (Despite not having an PC Port) and Conan (2004).
- In addition, some of their PC Ports are actually good: Chaser, The History Channel: Civil War – A Nation Divided and History Civil War: Secret Missions.
- Their logos are nice to look at.
Videos
TBA