Anacrusis Early-Access Review

The Anacrusis believes that co-op shooters require a new flavor. Nearly every game that’s followed in Left 4 Dead’s footsteps puts four players in a forlorn zombie apocalypse and asks them to blast out an escape route before they succumb to the horde. Sometimes the bleakness can become too much. Does teamwork really need to be so difficult? The Anacrusis counters this notion with bright pastels, a pulpy Jetsons inspired verve, and delightfully stray from the broken cities of Back 4 Blood. or the depths of Hell in GTFO or Call of Duty’s Zombies modes. The Anacrusis fails to create the necessary white-knuckle tension that makes co-op experiences memorable. The Anacrusis’ early-access version has three episodes. I think the only thing it adds to the co-op genre is a new coat of paint.

Your friends and yourself embark on a sleek, tangerine hued starship that floats in psychedelic outerspace. Guns and ammunition are splayed across the safe room — all sheathed in a porcelain, ’60s sci-fi aesthetic — and together, you’ll attempt to fend off a massive incursion of possessed, Cthulhu-headed crewmembers stalking the halls between you and the next checkpoint. It’s not hard to understand exactly where The Anacrusis draws its chief inspiration from: Chet Faliszek, co-founder of developer Stray Bombay, logged time on both Left 4 Dead and Left 4 Dead 2 While he was at Valve and despite vast differences in tone and setting The Anacrusis still requires you to cut down thousands of chittering, zombie facsimiles, before sealing the swarm behind an impenetrable gate.

I believe the goal is to survive by the skin you teeth. To wipe the sweat from the brow after another party pulls off an unlikely breakout. Instead, I experienced a feeling of dull malaise after the first level was completed. Stray Bombay, for whatever reason, flips all of its cards face down from the start. It doesn’t save any surprises for later. The strategy and form of the aliens that I faced in the first minutes were identical to those found in its later-game arctic stages. There are three basic weapons and they feel almost identical. They lack the same kinetic and fleshy feedback as Back 4 Blood. The Plasma Rifle is almost identical to the SMG, with the exception of a slower firing rate on the latter. Because they all performed equally well against any threat, no matter how large or small, I completely forgot about the gun I was using by the end of episode 2.

The mob appears, absorbs a lot of bullets and then dissipates. A few infected-style special villains are mixed in to add to the constant churn. For example, the Gooper can cover you in paralyzing green mucus; the Flasher fills your screen with a cornea damaging flashbang effect; and the Brute strikes hard and absorbs a lot of bullets. Although they require a bit of coordination among your friends, my party didn’t feel threatened. The majority of the time, everyone held the trigger button until victory was achieved. In fact, despite The Anacrusis’ adaptable difficulty settings that scale dynamically with the party’s performance, it only served me two encounters where I truly feared a wipe, and unsurprisingly, those were also the only instances where it truly grabbed my nervous system.

Let’s be clear: Some of the best co-op games (the early Serious Sams) revel in complete brainlessness. In interviews, Faliszek stated that he wanted The Anacrusis a game that can be played by all. hang out inside of – treating it like passive entertainment, akin to talking through a movie. That philosophy I believe has reduced The Anacrusis’ drama. There is no harsh punishment for death. If a party member falls, they can be revived quickly. And, barring any further damage, they can always be summoned out of the void at their full health. That robs it of some of the tension that made Left 4 Dead so successful – the way it forced its parties into a constant state of desperation created magical moments where you’re piling into the rescue helicopter, knowing you couldn’t have held out for a second longer. The Anacrusis is unable to summon that crucial element in its current form, which leaves it feeling strangely dead.

The Anacrusis’ environment design is disappointingly dull across the board. This is why I feel a lot of the dearth. This backdrop is incredible: the Summer of Love, in the dark recesses of galaxy. It’s a soundtrack with Isaac Hayes-ish, guitar scratches. It’s a fantastic idea, yet the spaceship is perpetually barren. In the first hour of gameplay I found myself in a massive serpentine shopping mall, and I was thrilled to get a glimpse of how the residents of this trippy dystopia lived… but as I navigated through the corridors and perused the shops, I found no flavor text or artistic flourishes to ground me in this world. It’s a very bleak atmosphere. It wasn’t even obvious what was being purchased and sold in all those boilerplate boutiques.

Screenshots from Anacrusis

The Anacrusis is light on traditional storytelling, (each episode kicks off with a short cutscene and that’s about it), and that’s a fine approach to take, but it also doesn’t make the effort to allow us to stumble into lore that transforms this technicolor shooting gallery into an identifiable, contextual universe. I was tired of opening doors to search for another grenade stash, so I gave up. Instead of a blooming of environmental storytelling that provided the most basic sense of what it meant, I became exhausted. What went wrong here. My party was informed by the recap screen at the end that they had killed more than 4,000 aliens. I didn’t know who they were. We We were or why we came here in the first instance.

Although the early access launch was light on content with only three levels that can all be completed in one evening, Stray Bombay has highlighted The Anacrusis’ replayability as a strength. To that end it borrows the “director” concept from the Left 4 Dead games – an unseen A.I. An orchestrator works behind the scenes to change the items that the party finds in their campaigns. Also, the size and composition of enemy encounters is based on your skill level. This will keep you on your toes. Although the exact layout of the encounters may vary between playthroughs, I found that the gunplay wasn’t too repetitive to change the overriding dryness of the action.

Each episode also features a slight progression system called roguelite. This means that there are upgrade stations all around the ship which offer minor bonuses to your ammo supply, damage output, revive speed, and other factors. Yet these straightforward stat boosts simply aren’t enough to open up new playstyles, meaningfully distinguish your character much from the rest of the party in how you play, or even change your approach from your previous run. I wished Stray Bombay would embrace a class-based system, so that everyone I was dungeoneering alongside had a unique kit and role. The Anacrusis would be less tedious if this were implemented. I would also be able to view the battle from different perspectives.

It should be noted that the toggle on the main menu equips characters and weapon skins (I assume they are acquired through levels or some other in-game currency), but I was never given any cosmetics or cash. The “SEASON” tab at the top bar that directs to a blank page with the words “Coming Soon” is what I believe causes the vacancy. The Anacrusis’ aspirations are high, but quite frankly, its biggest problem is that after completing my first run I didn’t feel an urge to return to any of its challenges.

I did anyway, for the sake of this review, but repeated playthroughs didn’t do much to redeem it. The starship is plagued by obvious polish problems. Certain maps appear to have been taken straight from Unreal Engine 2 in 2005. Gratingly, your party’s characters repeat the same small handful of voice lines over and over again to the point that it verges on high comedy. (They constantly scream the word “Goo.” It will be a constant sound in your dreams. Playing on PC with Windows 10 and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 2070 Super I encountered a chronic, fidgety stutter that infects the frame rate and the animation fidelity, and when you shoot an alien in the head from behind they propel towards the ceiling — either a bug or a hilarious joke, I couldn’t tell. It’s absurdly frustrating that there is no waypoints within levels. I would often have to rely upon the semi-audible voice announcements of the party to find out what to do with the nuclear canister I had just bought. This problem was magnified when I tried to play with a bot party (which Stray Bombay suggests only as a last resort) that got stuck on geometry. One point, I was confronted with a strange bug that rendered my interface unreadable. It had a red “X” on my character’s portrait. (For a second, I thought it was a fourth wall-breaking taunt. It wasn’t just a bit of early access jank.

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These oversights and bugs can be expected in any game that is still in development. The Anacrusis will certainly iron out all the kinks in a time-friendly world. But what do we get? What will we have left? A functional, but not inspiring co-op shooter? I fear that. It must find a stronger spark if The Anacrusis is to succeed as it strives towards a 1.0 release.