There’s a cliché that almost every new game nowadays is about “Space Marines”. Halo, Mass Effect, Destiny, you name it. You know what I say? There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that! 1st and 3rd person shooters are two of the most popular genres in gaming, and moving to locations other than earth allow for some great variety and amazing visuals. So why not lean right into the concept and just straight up name your game Interstellar Marines?
Interstellar Marines is an FPS that was Greenlit on Steam and is currently in Early Access, so you could pick it up right away and get full access to the game as it develops, but should you get it right now? Hopefully I can help with that.
The first thing I noticed about the game was the visuals and the sound work. This game looks really good, especially considering its relatively early stage in development. The environments aren’t always the most varied or colourful, but there is a high degree of polish. The lighting effects are also very well done, especially in dark levels, where you have to rely on your flashlight and intermittent lightning strikes to see anything. The sound is also fantastic. Many levels feature rain effects and you can really hear the difference in how the rain sounds from inside to outside. It’s a small thing, but a very nice touch.
There are a lot of nice touches in Interstellar Marines. Rain can fog up your facemask and make it harder to see. Getting shot in certain locations might disable your HUD, making it impossible to see hardpoints or discern between teammates and enemies. Some maps have a day/night cycle, and the darkness totally changes the way you have to approach the combat.
Based on interviews with the devs and descriptions on the store page, it seems like the big draw of Interstellar Marines is the co-op play. Here’s the problem, at this stage in development there isn’t any co-op yet. I couldn’t even group up with a friend when we played a regular match. We just had to hope we ended up on the same team. This would be okay, but the current game mode is a little rough. It’s a standard hardpoint capture mode, but when you die your respawn counter is set at 120 seconds. That’s WAYYYYY too long. The counter can be reduced if your team secures kills or captures a hardpoint, but it’s still a problem.
What tends to happen is one team gains an advantage and kills a few of the other team’s players pretty quickly. Then that team is stuck watching one player and hoping he can capture a hardpoint or get a couple kills to induce an early respawn, even though he/she is now fighting 1-v-5. It’s a bad mechanic, and I hope it’s addressed.
That’s kind of my overall impression of Interstellar Marines so far. It’s a beautiful game with some really neat and novel mechanics. The gameplay seems pretty solid as well. Unfortunately right now there’s only one game mode and it has some problems, and the feature that the game seems to be touting the most (co-op) hasn’t been implemented yet. If you’re sure you’re going to want Interstellar Marines when it reaches completion then it might be worth getting in early right now and participating through the development process. For everyone else, I think it would be best to wait and see how things develop and take another look once we get some co-op play, which is coming September 18 according to this trailer:
