Saw this pitched as a F.E.A.R successor, and while that’s totally accurate, with Merc radio chatter ASMR and a shotgun so good it caused my FPS to drop every time I fired it, that isn’t the whole story. Levels are pretty massive, marrying naturalistic design that really sells you on the claustrophobic reality of life on Mars, with spaces packed full of secret weapons and armor pickups- and, maybe most importantly, where you can indulge your Build Engine tendencies of messing with everything that isn’t nailed down. Even just the demo, where most doors are locked until the full release, was sprawling and interconnected enough to get well and truly lost. It's a cool combination, and with the tasteful inclusion of more modern elements, like having your health regenerate just enough that you can scrape through fights that a more strictly faithful title might have you savescum through, it pushes past some of homogeneity that’s been creeping into the Retro Shooter revival, and certainly seems like more just a spiritual successor.

But yeah, the shootouts are surprisingly tense, forcing you into these great cat-and-mouse encounters where you’ll have to track enemies through sound design and their increasingly frantic callouts alone- and it’s balanced well against their hitscan weapons, levels so densely packed that you can always break line of sight. Definitely recommend pushing difficulty high enough that even a lone soldier is something you’ll have to psych yourself up for.

Hard to say if it’ll follow through with some of the big ideas it’s hinting at, but one worth keeping an eye on.

Reviewed on Jul 09, 2022


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