The drawback with launching a multiplayer shooter is that gamers are a part of the content material. Without gamers, you’ve solely acquired half a bundle, even when there’s a single-player mode. MercurySteam’s Raiders of the Broken Planet (a Gears of War-styled co-op shooter with a lightweight PvP twist) has at all times regarded reasonably good, however with out individuals taking part in it, it’s a tough promote, and the sport simply by no means acquired off the bottom.
In an try and zap some life again into Raiders in time for the following episodic marketing campaign launch, for the following two days, you’ll be able to seize the complete sport (together with 4 solo/co-op campaigns) free on Steam to maintain eternally. Grab it now, and also you’ve acquired one thing in your crew to do over the weekend.
From the little bit I’ve performed up to now (the tutorial and half a mission solo), it’s a really nice-looking sport with an aesthetic midway between American sci-fi comics and European space-weirdness, which is sensible, provided that MercurySteam are Spanish. It appears extra cutscene/story heavy than most co-op video games, and performs loads like Gears of War, solely with automated use of canopy, and a leap button to permit some climbing round when wanted. The mixture of ranged and close-quarters brawling stays, plus every hero has their very own weapons and particular skills.
One attention-grabbing mechanical twist is that there are not any ammo drops. Similar to Doom 4, you might want to punch bullets out of enemies, so there’s an actual incentive to stand up shut and use your melee assaults even in case you’re a sniping-centric character, which supplies you good motive to at the least attempt to stick near your workforce. The missions appear fairly bombastic as effectively, with loads of environmental stuff happening whilst you’re attempting to place bullets in heads.
While you’ll be able to play the sport solo, the main focus is co-op with a twist. Your common workforce of 4 gamers get to be the heroes, however anybody that has accomplished a given marketing campaign because the goodies unlocks the choice to play because the Villain Of The Week to maintain the hero workforce on their toes. All the grunts, minions and executives will likely be in your aspect, and whilst you’re not particularly sturdy your self, you get so as to add somewhat little bit of human unpredictability to the unhealthy man forces. Plus, you respawn, whereas your minions don’t. The trailer above offers you a style of the dynamic.
Claiming your free copy in its entirety takes somewhat extra leg-work than most Steam giveaways, however not an excessive amount of. The demo model of the sport – six missions and a tutorial – is listed as free-to-play, and also you’ll need to obtain that first, run it as soon as (and possibly full the tutorial whilst you’re at it), then launch the sport once more by way of the Steam retailer Play Now buttons in every of the three further campaigns in flip, completely including them to your account.
You can seize the bottom Raiders of the Broken Planet sport on Steam here, together with the additional Alien Myths, Wardog Fury and Hades Betrayal campaigns. Once they’re unlocked, they need to not be greyed out on the mission choice display screen. There’s a fifth marketing campaign within the works, which’ll finally value actual cash once more, however from now till Friday you’ll be able to seize all the pieces else to maintain, which looks like a superb chunk of sport.
