Steam Next Fest is right around the corner but you don’t have to wait until then to check out new and upcoming games. Battle Shapers, from Metric Empire, is a sci-fi first-person shooter that has you shooting and smashing your way through swarms of corrupt robots. From now until the end of the Summer Game Fest on June 26, you can download the public demo for the game. I’ve played over an hour of Battle Shapers over the last few days and I’ll get to my thoughts on the game later, but for now, let’s talk about the game.
You play as Ada, a fighter reactivated for a final mission to reclaim the future of New Elysium from cunning and obnoxious Overlords. Weild an arsenal of futuristic weapons, abilities, and stolen Overlord powers to take down the ruthless Overlords, who will adapt and evolve as you face them. This means the challenges of their respective towers will change between runs.
Key Features of Battle Shapers
- Gun down hordes of cunning enemy machines with relentless risk-taking, and bot-busting close-range warfare in which every kill fuels your combat capabilities.
- Learn to adapt to the Overlords’ dangerous attacks and retaliations that are thrown at you every step of the way.
- Use Shaper Hacks to manipulate rewards, counter the Overlord challenges and deploy your own traps, power-ups and effects in their towers.
- Explore vibrant towers that promise hidden Upgrades and Weapons to strengthen your build from run-to-run.
- As your Powers grow and change, be careful—with every defeated Overlord, your path becomes more difficult.
- Unlock new Weapons, Abilities and Talents to permanently increase your survivability and combat potential with every run.
- Obtain the Cores of fallen Overlords to transform your combat abilities and appearance, offering new combat playstyles.
- Stack up on Core Enhancers to augment your equipped core capacities and unleash their full potential.
- Defy the Overlords to the sound of blazing, adrenaline-pumping rock music that will have you dive head-on and fist-first into the action.
As I said, I played over an hour of Battle Shapers over the last two days. Right off the bat, the game does certain things well. The visuals are crisp and the accompanying soundtrack is great. Before loading into each arena, you can customize your cores and purchase upgrades. Once you jump into the action, you will come across additional abilities that you can pick up and swap out as you play. Along with firing your weapons, which you can pick up as through the rooms, you can also melee attack. Metric Empire isn’t exaggerating when they say you have to use everything in your arsenal to take down the Overlords.
In the demo, there is only one Overlord, Volt Colossus. He can be a pain, but adapting is key to the gameplay loop. Much like any roguelike, it can take a few lives to get a hang of the game, but once you do, you will be able to get a tune on what builds work for you and what don’t. The few weapons in the demo do control differently and after a few rounds, I started to understand what was worth picking up for my playstyle and what was not.
Personally, Battle Shapers did not speak to me. The roguelike first-person shooter combo is a fun one, but it can also get chaotic and repetitive. It’s easy to get overwhelmed with the game (though that is part of the learning curve) and the visuals, as crisp and vibrant as they are, still can’t help the levels from feeling like more of the same. This could be the limitations of the demo, with only one Overlord being available, but that’s also all I have to go off of at the moment. I was able to beat Volt Colossus on my second go around and although I did go back for more, I had no real urge to. There wasn’t enough to entice me to want to keep me repeating the loop.
On top of that, while the gameplay was mostly smooth, there were still plenty of freezes during certain action-heavy moments that dampened the experience a bit too. Pretty much every time I used the melee attack the game would stutter. This consequently made me not want to use the ability as much as I should and in a game where you have to use “everything in your arsenal” that’s an unfortunate result.
That all being said, now that the demo is out, you can decide for yourself if the game is for you or not. My first impressions of the game mean I might not be first in line to play the game after its release, but you can Wishlist it now if you do end up liking it. Battle Shapers is expected to release in Q3 of this year for PC via Steam. If you did check out the game, let me know in the comments what you thought about it. A preview code of the demo was sent by the publisher for coverage. You can also tune into the first episode of our podcast below to hear me talk about the game a bit more candidly.
