TL;DR
Wanted a turn-brain-off roguelike shooter I could throw my own music over and just sink into a flow state with, game delivered exactly that. If that’s what you’re after, I’d recommend it.
Apparently this ties into the wider Starsiege/Tribes universe, but I’ve never played those games, and the game didn’t make me feel like I needed to. The story is simple enough to follow on its own: you wake up with no idea who you are or why you’re here, only that every hostile clanker between you and the next exit needs to die.
The game is split into four zones. Each zone has a main run made up of 30 short "sectors"", plus optional side challenges of about 20 sectors. Most sectors only take around a minute, and the maps are either blocky linear corridors and square rooms, or a single arena-style room. That makes runs very easy to dip into and keeps the pace moving, though personally I’d have preferred fewer sectors that were larger and more open.
The combat loop is where the game works best. It starts off slow and pretty easy, you go clearing room to room with a dinky pistol against enemies that stand and fire slow moving inaccurate bolts. But the further you get, the more varied and dangerous the enemies become. There are some genuinely interesting enemy designs here I haven't seen in other shooters, and the escalation gives the run a good sense of momentum. You keep up by swapping weapons, upgrading your loadout, and buying gear from fabricators between sectors. Since it’s a roguelike, a lot depends on what drops you get, though side-run unlocks do at least give you some ways to smooth out the RNG.
That said, I don’t think the game’s build variety is as broad as it first appears. Ice, armour and raw weapon-damage perks felt much stronger than others by far. Drones, health, shields, and all the non-ice/non-lightning elemental options didn’t seem to scale nearly as well later on. Weapons felt similar: the game clearly favours close- to mid-range combat. Tempest and Iron Sides both felt extremely strong, while snipers and other long-range weapons were held back by the tight maps and by how aggressively enemies close the distance in later zones.
Movement is decent overall. You start off fairly sluggish, then gradually pick up speed and dashes upgrades, by the end of each zone you're close to Doomguy speed. I was less keen on the platforming in the later zones, though, and I wish the game leaned harder into verticality. There’s a helium canister pickup that lets you float while jumping, and it’s one of the most fun movement tools in the game. Firing at enemies mid-air feels great. In the sequel, I’d love to see that kind of mobility made baseline, with more maps designed around it.
The story mostly stays out of the way, which works for this kind of game. Most of it comes through data slates from off-screen characters, and it doesn’t really come to the foreground until zones 3 and 4. Meta-progression is also very fast; I’d unlocked most of it within about 10 hours by Zone 2, which felt a little too quick.
The music is fine, but it gets repetitive fast for a game built around replaying runs. I ended up muting it and just using my own playlist.
I also played on Linux and performance was solid overall, though I did have one nasty crash to desktop while messing around with ray tracing settings.
Overall, this is a good switch your brain off and keep pushing forward roguelike shooter. I don’t think all of its systems are equally well balanced, and I wish the maps and movement had a bit more ambition, but the core loop is satisfying and it absolutely delivered on the specific itch I bought it for.
