After that point, it continues to riff on similar themes, though there’s more and more signs of how damaged the ship is becoming through the invasion. It takes a bit too long before you get to step out into something that really feels completely different – a huge artificial garden under a fake sky. As cool as the kitschy 60s sci-fi vibe is, the opening stages of the first episode just feel like running down a series of similar feeling vibrantly coloured hallways. The highs and lows of the weapons are echoed through some of the level design. There’s also special pick up weapons that can arc electricity through closely-packed throngs, place a defensive turret, and more. The Stasis grenade slows anything that moves through its bubble, which is a godsend when dealing with Brutes, while the Vortex grenade sucks everything in toward a mini black hole and then spits them out again. The Anacrusis almost makes up for this by having an array of fun grenades to throw into the hordes. They all come from a brand of ‘pew-pew’ laser guns that just isn’t particularly interesting, even if they will send the regular enemies flying or take them out in a couple of quick shots. Good eggs.ĭealing with all these enemies means using an arsenal of weapons that might be appropriately sci fi, but feel a bit bland to use. They’re so overpowered they can absolutely wreck a run. Acting like the Witch from L4D, they don’t react until triggered, but when they do? Hoo-boy! You better be ready for a flood of impossible-to-deal-with spiked balls that roll toward you and fill your entire view of the world until you die. Perhaps my favourite enemy in the game is the Egg (or “Babies” as we started calling them for some reason). The Spawner creates ball aliens that roll around and unfurl to shoot at you like some kind of Droideka, while the Flasher isn’t an alien that shows an inappropriate amount of skin, but rather one that fills its surrounding area with blindingly bright light that makes it difficult to make out what’s going on. There’s a few Left 4 Dead tropes with the big lad Brute, the long-distance Grabber, and the Gooper that will slow you down and fix you in place, but things get more interesting from there. They’re a diverse bunch, which is always nice to see, and you quickly pick up from their incidental dialogue that they’re not that well equipped to take on an alien invasion by themselves. These are the face-hugging kind for the most part, completely incapacitating the ship’s population and turning them into mindless hosts, but a handful of survivors remain – Nessa, Guion, Liu and Lance. The game is set upon a huge starship on the edge of explored space that has suddenly found itself swamped by an extra-terrestrial threat. What I’m trying to say is that The Anacrusis is Left 4 Dead by way of Space Channel 5. Out in PC Early Access and Xbox Game Preview (and Game Pass!) today, The Anacrusis lands somewhere between an idyllic swinging sixties style of futurism that’s showing signs of wear and ultimately falls apart as an alien menace suddenly emerges. Seeing what people thought the future would look like in now decades old science fiction is so revealing of the time in which is was created, conjuring visions of gleaming optimism or grimy despair for our future. Retro-futurism is one of my favourite things.
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