Freediver: Triton Down is a mysterious VR adventure game just announced today from Archiact, the developers behind co-op bullet hell VR shooter, Evasion. In Freediver you take on the role of Ren Tanaka and must navigate a sinking ship to find your way to safety.
In contrast to Evasion, which was heavily focused on the cooperative experience, Freediver is a strictly single player experience that aims to offer thrills similar to disaster blockbuster films.
Check out the 360-degree trailer for a taste of what it’s like:
“Immersive games offer players new worlds to inhabit; our games change how players inhabit virtual worlds,” Kurt Busch, studio head at Archiact, said in a prepared statement. “FREEDIVER: Triton Down is a focused, intense experience that pulls you under from the first breath, and doesn’t let go until you put the headset down.”
Since this is a survival-focused game you’ll need to worry about things like rising seawater and your oxygen levels in order to stay alive. Rather than traditional artificial smooth locomotion to swim, you’ll use motion controllers to swim around with “gestural locomotion” as Archiact calls it. This means you’ll move around by using “intuitive dive and swim movements” in the game, which sounds similar to underwater swimming in Skyrim VR.
From what we’ve seen and heard, Freediver is shaping up to be a tense and stressful VR experience similar to the likes of ADR1FT, but this time underwater instead of in space. Freediver: Triton Down is slated for release very soon in May 2019 for $8.99 on Oculus Home and SteamVR.
Let us know what you think of the game so far down in the comments below!
Archiact, the studio behind VR games Evasion (2018) and Waddle Home (2016), are diving into new territory soon with an upcoming VR experience that promises to give claustrophobics and thalassophobics (people afraid of open bodies of water) a shared reason to never put on a VR headset ever again.
Called FREEDIVER: Triton Down, the underwater adventure is said to make use of ‘gesture-driven’ movement, something Archiact maintains will be an intuitive and immersive swimming and diving mechanic in VR.
The game is said to arrive on Steam and the Oculus Store sometime in May 2019.
Like Subnautica (2018), Freediver makes heavy use of the much beloved (and equally maligned) limited breathing mechanic, something that will no doubt place pressure on players as they try to solve the world’s interactive puzzles. These, Archiact says, require players to stay calm, think fast, and use your ever-evolving environment to escape the guts of the ship.
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Image courtesy Archiact
Image courtesy Archiact
Image courtesy Archiact
Image courtesy Archiact
Image courtesy Archiact
Image courtesy Archiact
Here’s Archiact’s description of Freediver:
A submersive adventure with a mysterious edge, FREEDIVER: Triton Down plunges players into a capsizing research ship, the R.S.V Triton, where survival means outmaneuvering the water’s lethal surge. As freediver Ren Tanaka, players must navigate a sinking ship, overcome underwater chaos, and unlock their path to the surface, all while protecting their most precious resource: the breath in their lungs.
The studio is couching it as a fully-interactive single-player experience, which could mean it’ll be on the shorter end of the spectrum versus a full-length game.
It’s going to be priced at $9 when its released in May on Steam and the Oculus Store. The exact release day isn’t certain yet, but we’ll update as soon as we know more.
In the meantime, you check out the 360 trailer below:
Archiact launched its dynamic first-person shooter Evasion several months ago for Oculus Rift, HTC Vive and PlayStation VR. Having released a couple of updates since then, today the studio has announced the rollout of its biggest content update yet, adding a more competitive edge to the multiplayer experience.
Called the ‘Killstreak Update’, what Archiact has done is introduce an arcade-style scoring system for players, as well as a leaderboard for every mission and difficulty Evasion has to offer. As the campaign allows up to four players to cooperatively complete every mission, with the new additions they can now compete to see who’s the best, with points awarded for Base Kills, Lash Kills, Surge Kills, Assists and more.
And to celebrate the update release, Archiact will be holding a challenge event this weekend. So from 4pm PT on Friday 15th February until 6pm PT on Sunday 17th February, you will be able to fight side by side with the developers to challenge their skills. Top-scoring players form each platform will then be awarded prizes.
A frantic sci-fi shooter that can be played in either single-player or co-op multiplayer modes. Evasion allows gives you the option to choose from four character classes (Striker, Surgeon, Engineer and Warden) each having their own unique strengths, weapons and abilities, which you’re then able to customise as they level-up.
Featuring an action-packed story campaign as well as a Survival Mode, the studio paid particular attention to the locomotion aspects of the title. Movement plays a very important role in any FPS, so Archiact has been keen to ensure players are as comfortable as possible whilst in VR. There’s a big range of movement customisation options available to suit every need. Whether that’s teleportation, smooth locomotion, snap turning or anything in between. Additionally, the PlayStation VR version also comes with support for the PlayStation Aim controller, although this does mean you can’t dual wield.
Evasion was one of VRFocus’ favourite VR shooters of 2018, making it onto our ‘Best HTC Vive Games of 2018‘ list. VRFocuswill continue its coverage of Archiact and Evasion, reporting back with any further updates.
Evasionis a sci-fi VR shooter that has a heavy focus on constant movement, lots of enemies and bullets on-screen, and a frantic pace that can be played either solo or with a friend. There are different character classes and a solid amount of content, adding up to a fun, relatively simple, arcade-style shooter. For a game like this, a strong, consistent art style is important not only for immersion, but to sell a vision.
I don’t think I’d say the visual fidelity rivals any of the top-tier VR titles, but the art direction and art style itself is quite bold and unique. There’s a lot of variety between the various locales and a lot of work was put into establishing the lore for the property.
Archiact, the developers of Evasion, shared with us an internal interview they hosted with the game’s Art Director, Fran Gaulin. Before working on Evasion, Gaulin worked both outside of the game industry and in the market on some of the biggest properties out there, such as Mass Effect, Dragon Age, and Dead Rising.
You can watch the full interview above for more insights into working in art direction for not only video games, but virutal reality itself as well.
Make sure to read our full review of Evasion to see what we thought and let us know what you think down in the comments below!
Today Evasion is finally out on PSVR and PC VR. This is a first-person shooter that’s part bullet-hell chaos in VR and all fast-paced frenetic action. It can be played in co-op with a buddy by your side or solo with one of four different classes.
We’ll be playing Evasion on Rift with Touch. We will also be joined by our new Editor-in-Chief, Kyle Riesenbeck, who will handle giving out codes on the stream today. All codes are for Steam, either Rift or Vive. We’re starting any minute now, right around 1:00PM PT and we’ll aim to last for around an hour or so. We’ll be livestreaming directly to the UploadVR Facebook page and also using Restream to go directly to YouTube as well. Either way, you can see the full stream embedded right here down below once it’s up:
Evasion is a first-person sci-fi shooter from indie AR/VR studio Archiact. With its co-op campaign missions, the game is decidedly aiming to capture a Halo-esque shooting experience along with massive numbers of enemies, something the studio has been couching as a bullet-hell genre shooter. While it’s a technically competent game that looks and feels well polished, some lackluster enemy types and repetitive gameplay left me feeling pretty ambivalent about moving forward through the off-world colony.
Developer: Archiact Available On: Steam (Vive, Rift), PlayStation Store (PSVR) Reviewed On: Oculus Rift, HTC Vive Release Date: October 9th, 2018
Gameplay
As a sci-fi super soldier, you’ve been dispatched to a mining colony that’s been overrun by a race of robots called the Optera who’ve broken an armistice in search of a super rare substance, a metal that’s used in powerful illegal weaponry. We’re not really here for the story though, because as it goes, it’s a pretty cookie cutter pretense for exercising your trigger fingers—one dedicated to firing, and the other dedicated to secondary attacks, healing, and interacting with key items in the game.
With four classes to choose from, Striker, Surgeon, Warden and Engineer, you’re offered up a few fixed variables such as max health, shield size, gun strength and ultimate ‘Surge’ attack. There’s no in-game currency or weapon upgrades to look forward to, making it essentially the same shooting experience throughout the entire game.
Image courtesy Archiact
Your singular primary weapon has three fundamental firing modes: semi-auto standard shot, charge shot, and an ultimate, all of which requires collecting yellow power canisters dropped by enemies upon death. You can speed the collection process by using your secondary heal/tractor beam weapon on critically damaged enemies, and getting a guaranteed power or health pickup. While healing are predictably doled out randomly, if you play in co-op mode you can infinitely heal your buddy at no material cost to you, something I felt detracted from the overall co-op experience. With two players, I never had the sense that I would run out of anything at any time, and a life-saving heal was always just a simple ask away.
While the emphasis here is on cooperative play to make for a balanced assault, you can play the entire game in singe-player mode if you want; difficulty appears to scale depending on the number of players in your party.
Visually, the game has very few flaws, delivering masses of articulated enemies and lasers at a buttery smooth frame rate even on top settings using my testing rig (GTX 1080 and Core i7 – 6700K), a testament to Archiact’s ability to create a truly cohesive VR environment. Specific destructible points in the game, while entirely inconsequential to gameplay, make for an interesting sideshow to the sprawling industrial facility.
Image courtesy Archiact
The studio has however labeled the game as “the next generation of VR combat,” and a bullet-hell shooter. Here’s a few reasons though why those monikers don’t really fit.
The bullet-hell shooter genre is pretty well-defined. At its essence, it’s a test of a player’s skill to be able to recognize patterns in the stream of enemy bullets and successfully navigate your way through, all the while accruing minimal damage. Throughout most bullet-hell shooters, you’re also given increasingly cool weapons that you have to tactically use for fear of running dry at critical moments. There’s always an even cooler weapon around the corner that’s risky to get, which not only provides a sense of urgency, but also fear of failing the mission after taking too much damage in the process. Simply put, there’s a carrot and a stick. You desperately hate the stick, and you’ll almost die to get that carrot, making Evasion more of a ‘bullet-heck’ flavored substitute.
In single player mode, what actually follows is an exercise in blandly strafing back and forth as you deflect oncoming barrages (with varying amount of success) and sponge-up whatever stray lasers are fired from randomly spawning baddies. Bad guys always shoot where you are, and never where you’re going to be, so it’s a simple task in making sure you have enough lateral room to escape the lasers as they land at your flank, and simultaneously prioritizing targets.
This changes in co-op mode as baddies have multiple targets to consider, namely you and your friends, but then it erupts into something of a blind chaos. Without a good idea of when I was deflecting shots or absorbing them—both audio cues are deceptively similar in sound—you’re left with the job of sallying forth, taking the inevitable damage, and maximizing your health pickups along the way which you can tractor-beam to your position without any added fear of losing out. However you slice it though, it’s a bog standard arcade shooter with lots of the same enemy types in quantity, and no new weapons to look forward to.
And by ‘bog standard’, I mean it comes replete with some decidedly tired VR shooter tropes: floating gun reticles for easy aiming, repetitive enemy types, the “helpful” AI voice who tells you exactly where to go and what to do, and waypoints as breadcrumbs to your next objective. Walk here. Scan this. Shoot these guys until they’re gone for whatever reason. It’s the same story throughout the entire game. I was also always waiting for those big boss reveals that bullet-hells are notorious for, but I was led through the game with continuously repeating B-class baddies until the very end.
That said, I made full use of my three available lives in the later levels where difficulty ramps up significantly—so personal gripes notwithstanding, it’s does present a challenge that a group of proficient marksmen will find difficult. My personal playthrough took just under five hours to complete on campaign mode, which consisted of nine missions. A co-op survival mode is available as well, which should keep your party entertained for a while longer once you’re done with the game’s story.
Full-bodied avatars, created with IKINEMA’s inverse kinematics, are fairly well done, although they’re scaled strangely to fit a range of heights—from four feet to seven feet tall. At the bottom end of the range, you’re treated to a child-sized avatar holding giant guns, which while hilarious, is somewhat immersion breaking in co-op. More on that in the ‘Comfort‘ section.
Speaking of guns, they have a typical ‘VR weightlessness’ which is really hard to avoid without a dedicated peripheral like PS AIM (supported in the PSVR version). By not providing any recoil though, it makes them feel more like magic wands than massive weaponry fit for a space marine super soldier. No reloading or ability to drop your gun (they’re glued to your hands) puts any hand presence out of the question for Evasion.
Image courtesy Archiact
Enemy animations are competent, although all but a single rolling exploding robot type ever offered any up-close and personal encounters, as I was hoping for some melee from the hulking nine foot-tall walking bots that never materialized.
Vive controls are less capable overall, as I found it difficult to do tighter strafing maneuvers than on Oculus Touch’s analog sticks. Interactions in the game are however very simple (point and shoot), and while Vive movement is fairly sludgy, you can get used to them.
Because of the range of heights made available, you can easily play sitting down by putting your avatar’s height in the upper range.
Evasion also offers a number of locomotion modes that makes it a very comfortable game. You’ll be able to choose from a free locomotion mode with both variable snap-turn and smooth-turning, a ‘dash’ mode that turns your movements into a sort of instant teleportation slide show, and a jogging mode that allows you to jog in place to move in the desired directions. Of course, if you have a 360 tracking setup, you’ll be mostly relying on the head-relative forward movement.
Comfort vignettes can be toggled on to provide a temporary limiter to your field of view when you turn, which has been shown to help with motion-related nausea.
Over two and a half years after the launch of consumer-grade VR headsets, my favorite thing to do in VR is still to stand side-by-side, with a friend, while fighting enemies. Whether it be a tactical military shooter like Firewall Zero Hour, a pirate-themed adventure in Rec Room, or a tense arcade-style bullet hell shooter like Evasion, all VR is better with friends.
Evasion is a game that is built, from the ground up, with co-op multiplayer the very heart of its identity. So much so, in fact, that it’s often overwhelming to the point of being frustrating if you try to play it alone. It’s very possible, but it’s going to give you a tough challenge.
The team at Archiact have done a great job of crafting a rich, detailed world. You can read more about the setup for the conflicts in Evasion here, with a blog post directly from the game’s Lead Writer. The premise is pretty simple: humans are colonizing space and mining for precious resources that are being contested by an aggressive alien race that was previously working with the humans. You shoot hundreds of bad guy aliens and fight your way through a series of missions to find out what’s going on. One way to look at Evasion, especially for the PSVR audience, is to think of it as a faster-paced version of Farpoint, but this time with co-op in the actual campaign.
In Evasion you’ve got four different classes to pick from. The Surgeon, which is a combat medic type, that can heal multiple allies at the same time and the “Contagion” ability on his blaster can bounce between enemies. Then there’s the Striker. She’s a more agile and quick-thinking class with armor-piercing rounds, a smaller shield that can deflect attacks, and a particle beam style weapon.
Next is the Warden, my favorite class. He’s kind of the polar opposite of the Striker in that he is heavily armored and described as a “one-man wrecking crew.” His main blaster is a bit more like a shotgun and he’s also got a grenade launcher and a large tower-style shield. His tether link can actually buff allies, increasing their damage resistance, and his big Surge Attack shoots out a bunch of cluster bombs. I’ve always gravitated towards the most tank-link characters in games. Finally, there’s the Engineer. She can shoot off orb-shaped charges the do big damage and overload enemy systems with a charged attack. Her tether grabs enemies out of the air and she can also buff allies with increased damage.
I really enjoyed the class variety, but I was hoping for a bit more nuance inside the game’s structure. There isn’t really a good progression system in place to make it feel like you’re constantly growing in power, so you’re more or less left with whatever you start with. It would have been nice to have a bit more influence over weapons and abilities as you play through the game.
I’ve played a lot of Evasion over the last year since it was originally announced at various events on Rift, Vive, and PSVR — but most of my time for this review was spent on PSVR using the PS Aim controller. Despite the performance downgrade and lack of roomscale movement, this was my favorite way to play the game because of the PS Aim controller. I’m convinced that most any shooter is enhanced with this device. I’d much rather hold a rifle in my arms than two separated motion controllers if it fits the game I’m playing. Technically it also supports DualShock 4 as well, but it was dramatically better with the PS Aim. DualShock controls are just like in Farpoint or Firewall Zero Hour, in that you physically move the controller around and aim it as if it were a gun. There is no PS Move support due to the lack of analog sticks.
The biggest difference between playing on PC VR headsets and PSVR is that if you’re on Rift or Vive, then your character is holding two guns. In your primary hand it’s your main weapon and in your secondary hand it’s a shield glued onto the front of your tether gun. The tether gun lets you do things like heal allies, buff allies, swing enemies around, and so on depending on your class. And when an enemy is near death, the tether gun can actually grab power-ups from enemies and blow them up. But if you use the PS Aim controller, you don’t have two separated hands. Instead you have a single rifle weapon that has the functionality of both guns mushed together with a shield in front. You lose a little flexibility since you can’t block and shoot in two different directions, but the sense of presence and increased accuracy afforded more than makes up for it.
Evasion is the type of game you can’t sit still with. You’ve got to always be moving around levels and your play space as much as you’re able. It really embraces the “bullet hell” designation whole-heatedly, similar to games like Blasters of the Universe.
One of the most impressive bits about Evasion from a technical standpoint is just how much work has gone into making Unreal run efficiently, even on PSVR. There are tons of bullet flying all over the place at any given time, dozens of enemies on the screen, terrain and points of cover getting blown up and destroyed, and lots of quick, erratic movement. It’s a lot to render at a steady FPS, but it never faltered for me. Also, they use Ikinema’s avatar system to fully animate your entire body. It all looks and feels really great. I especially liked how the bottom portion of the Striker’s tunic flows and moves around as you walk.
Gameplay feels excellent too. The production values, especially when compared to other VR shooters, are extremely high and there is a real visceral sense of power behind your weapons. The soundtrack (rocking heavy metal like DOOM VFR) and computer AI writing and voice acting also deserve specific shout outs as well. There’s a bit of clever humor here to keep you smiling while bullets rain down around you.
Unfortunately, Evasion does have a slight content problem with its five hour campaign. Luckily there is also a wave-based horde mode on top of the main batch of missions, but it’s not something you’ll likely spend a lot of time in. With only three levels to pick from it’s definitely a tacked-on afterthought to pad out the list of things to do, but it’s welcomed change of pace never the less.
The developers at Archiact also did a great job of making Evasion as accessible as possible. You can really dig in and tweak a bunch of the comfort settings in terms of movement and rotation, FOV, and more.
Whereas games like Seeking Dawn look great in trailers but don’t feel finished when you play them, Evasion has the reverse issue — visually the environments are mostly bland and isn’t the greatest looking game by any stretch, but it has the mechanical polish of a AAA-quality shooter in VR with the gameplay to back it up.
Final Score:8/10 – Good
Evasion does a lot right. The chaos and intensity of combat is second-to-none in the VR shooter space from what I’ve scene, particularly when compared to other cooperative VR shooters. You’ll always be moving and dodging fire both physically and with in-game smooth locomotion at all times. There isn’t as much progression across the game in terms of class abilities and leveling up as I’d have liked, but the core gameplay, boss fights, and level design are so strong I didn’t mind as much. Playing solo is a bit rough, so with a friend by your side Evasion not only becomes one of VR’s best shooters, but you’ll be hard-pressed to find any other VR game that’s as purely fun on a moment-to-moment basis.
There are a fair number of VR games, both available now and coming up, that feel a lot like the next evolutionary step of the arcade-style light gun shooter, like Time Crisis or House of the Dead. You have more mobility and agency in a VR game, of course, but only just, and the VR bits are used to iterate on, or just awkwardly bolted on top of, the existing gameplay model.
Evasion, conversely, is about movement and, well, evasion. On PSVR, you can play the game with the PS Aim controller, but on PC-based platforms like Rift and Vive, it uses a two-handed control scheme with the corresponding motion controllers. Either way, it’s a first-person shooter that initially feels very arcade-like, pitting your space mercenary up against armies of invading robot insects.
The studio, Archiact, is based in Vancouver, and has put a 25-person team to work on Evasion. The developers at PAX West told me that they were influenced a great deal by the recent success of Ninja Theory, and wanted to follow their lead in making a big, full-size flagship title. Right now, Evasion features nine missions with three survival modes, leavened with a bit of dark humor and a decent soundtrack.
It took me a minute to figure Evasion out. I was running into each new fight and acting like I just put roots down. I’d stand there and target-lock on each one, methodically blowing them away. That worked for a while, but the further I got into the mission at hand—defending an off-world mining colony from what seemed to be an unprovoked attack by the bugs—the less effective it became.
It was only when I realized the game was probably named Evasion for a reason—it was late, I was tired, leave me alone—that I started using my mobility to my advantage, strafing and circling like you can in a non-VR FPS. The longer you can go without getting hit, the more your weapon charges up, and the stronger your basic attack gets. You can eventually discharge it in a single, screen-clearing super attack that feels a little bit like parking the moon on something’s face.
The trade-off for that mobility is that healing is easier if you stand still. Sometimes, enemies drop a green healing item, a big canister full of what probably isn’t Mountain Dew, and you can yank it towards you with a tractor beam built into your main weapon. When you do, the canister creates a small circular healing field on the ground that rapidly restores your health for as long as you can manage to stand inside it. It’s a trade-off; you’re immobile but healing quickly.
It isn’t as much of a death sentence as it sounds like, because your main gun in Evasion generates a force field in front of it, in a way that the developers mentioned was influenced by Audioshield. Any incoming enemy fire that strikes your force field gets reflected away at an angle, which lets you occasionally pool-shark an opponent’s bullet straight back at it. It’s a tricky, all-or-nothing mechanic that feels a bit like playing lacrosse. Death lacrosse. With machine guns.
I only got to play the game solo, but Evasion is a cooperative, class-based shooter for up to four players, with each class—surgeon, striker, warden, and engineer—featuring different basic capabilities. I played as the striker, who does a lot of damage with a charged laser beam, but compensates for that with a smaller force field. As the game picks up speed, teamwork becomes more important, as you’re frequently surrounded, ambushed, or forced to stay still in order to accomplish objectives.
Evasion is a little tricky, because as I was discussing above, it’s one of those games that punishes you for dragging in pre-conceptions from other games or genres. It looks like the sort of shooting gallery where you’re supposed to stand still and block or destroy anything coming your way, but not only are you not nailed to the floor, but the game is set up to make you feel like standing still is a death sentence. I’m really curious to find out how it would play on higher difficulties, with a full team.
When it comes to virtual reality (VR) with devices such as HTC Vive, Oculus Rift or Windows Mixed Reality, large part of the experience comes from the power and quality of your PC. In order to get the best from VR, you need a great PC. This is not exactly an inexpensive task, however. To celebrate the launch of its upcoming shooter Evasion, developer Archiact have teamed with PC maker Alienware to launch a competition to win an Area 51 Gaming Rig.
Evasion is due to launch for HTC Vive, Oculus Rift and PlayStation VR on 9th October, 2018. Fans can enter the competition for the chance to win an Alienware Area 51 PC gaming rig and a copy of Evasion.
The Alienware Area 51 PC is a powerful desktop PC powered by an Intel Core i9 7900X, with up to 4.5GHz using Intel Turbo Boost Max 3.0. Graphics are driven by an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 with 8GB of GDDR5X RAM. A 512 GB SSD hard drive allows for fast loading speeds for your applications, while a 2TB SATA hard drive provides storage space.
Also included is an Alienware AW568 gaming keyboard and Alienware AW558 Advanced gaming mouse and an Alienware 25 AW2518H monitor.
Copies of Evasion are also up for grabs. Evasion is the latest VR title from Architect, and is a sci-fi shooter which can be played either single-player or in co-operative multiplayer. Players can choose from one of four classes, Striker, Surgeon, Engineer and Warden. Each of these classes has its own capabilities and weaponry, and players can customise the character as the progress.
The contest is open to residents of Canada and the USA, and begins at 12:00am Eastern Time on 10th September, 2018 and is due to end on 21st October, 2018 at 11:59pm (ET). Further information can be found on the Evasion website.
For further coverage on offers and competitions related to VR, keep checking back with VRFocus.
Editor’s Note: This post was written by Evasion developer Archiact’s Lead Writer, Peter Boychuk, and is being published here as a guest developer blog.
Evasion is a sci-fi bullet hell shooter for PlayStation VR, HTC Vive and Oculus Rift. If you haven’t already, check out the latest trailer for a glimpse into the pulse-pounding action we’ve got in store for you later this year.
We’d like to take this opportunity to do a deep dive into Evasion’s characters, locations and story.
Humanity Takes to the Stars
Evasion is set in the early 23rd Century. Humans have colonized the spaceways thanks to FTL drives that run on a fuel called chloragen, which has become the galaxy’s most precious commodity.
The richest source of chloragen is found in space claimed by the Optera, a highly advanced and fiercely xenophobic race. When humans attempted to mine one of their worlds, a terrible war erupted. Millions of lives were lost on both sides before a fragile truce was declared. As a concession, humans were permitted to colonize one of the Optera’s moons. That moon, which the humans christened ‘Faro Colony’, became the galaxy’s largest exporter of chloragen.
Peace is Shattered
Now, decades later, the Optera have suddenly and unexpectedly launched an attack on Faro Colony. Your mission is to find out what happened on Faro Colony, and unearth what motivated the Optera to reopen a conflict that nearly brought both species to the brink of extinction. The lives of the over twelve thousand colonists, not to mention the rest of humanity, hang in the balance. Along the way, you’ll liberate outposts, travel deep into a chloragen mine, explore a town built into a crater, and face off against legions of Optera.
Enter the Vanguard
You play as a member of the Vanguard, an elite special ops team that specialize in breach reconnaissance. Like Navy SEALs of yore, the Vanguard are sent into galactic ‘hot spots’ to reconnoiter and deter threats. The Vanguard have four different classes — Striker, Surgeon, Warden and Engineer — each of which have a unique arsenal of weapons and abilities. You will learn more about each of these ‘hero classes’ and their capabilities in future blog posts.
A Lethal Enemy
No human has ever set foot on the Optera homeworld, so little is known about the Optera’s true origins. Did they evolve from insects, as their physiology would suggest? Are their exoskeletal structures some kind of cybernetic armor or a robotic vehicle? Their technology is highly advanced: they wield deadly energy weapons, can instantly teleport troops, and are able to launch highly coordinated attacks that don’t seem to rely on verbal communication. But what they want, and why they are so zealous about guarding their territory, remains a mystery to be solved.
You will encounter dozens of different kind of Optera as you travel through Faro Colony. From the ubiquitous Paragord to the elusive Skimmer to the fearsome Megatoma, they each pose a unique challenge that will force you to use every weapon and ability in your arsenal to survive.
Into the Storm
The campaign kicks off with a desperate distress call by Carl Dyson, a mine supervisor. Faro Colony is under attack, he proclaims, before his transmission is jammed. By the time you have boots on the ground, the moon is swarming with Optera, and you have to fight your way to the comm tower in order to discover what happened to Dyson and the other twelve thousand colonists.
Your actions are coordinated by A.D.E.L.E., an Autonomous Deep Learning Entity that helps you overcome obstacles throughout the game and provide vital insights as you fight your way deeper into enemy territory. By gaining power ups, you will unlock new weapon capabilities and learn how to wield the powerful equipment at your disposal. And as you progress further in the story, you will solve the mystery of why the Optera attacked, and what it means for the rest of the galaxy.
