BOUNDARY Preview

Zero gravity combat is not an easy subject to tackle, nor is BOUNDARYthe first to attempt to pull this off in a first-person shooter. Some may remember a little game called Shattered Horizon back in 2009 from Futuremark. We even covered that game, which you can read about right here.

While having the freedom of all axes seems a good idea on paper, it’s hard to execute in practice. Having to think about movement like it’s a space combat simulator, but realising you’re just a meat sack in a spacesuit, takes some getting used to. However, Studio Surgical Scalpels feel they’re up to the challenge.

Saying that BOUNDARY is like Call of Duty in space does it a disservice. While that’s likely the comparison most would make, and in all honesty it does make sense, there’s enough to warrant this standing on its own without such a comparison. Yes you shoot guns and the kill feed feels like a CoD game, but also we’re not taking into consideration that your gun is in one hand while your thruster control is in the other. Having this set in space does open it up for huge potential, not only in map design but also in-game tactics as you do have to think about every possible angle of attack.

This is a class-based shooter with ability, suit, and weapon modifications. Starting out with Barry bog-standard (not his real name), this operator would be your typical assault-style class. Armed with an assault rifle, pistol, and a knife, this will be what you see the most of in battles — as other classes need to be unlocked via gameplay — so get used to how this guy looks. This leads to one of the small problems I had… everyone is in a pissing white spacesuit! Yep, in space, no one thought of colour coordination for the teams. Thankfully there are blue and orange highlights within the UI to determine if you’re looking at a baddie or a goodie, though it would have been nice to also have a bit of model differentiation too.

Two more classes reside in this demo, though locked until the third day of Steam Fest. One is a heavy-armoured support class armed with a light machine gun, likely capable of heavy sustained bursts of fire, and the other is a light medic-style class able to drop repair pods to keep their teammates up. All three classes can customise their loadouts, take different weapons, modify their weapons with scopes, and so on so that each team can effectively bring the best equipment to suit their tactics.

There are only two game modes in the BOUNDARY demo, both of which are five-vs-five affairs. The first is team elimination where each team starts on opposite sides of the map and each player only has one life. Once you’ve kicked the bucket, you’re sat there twiddling thumbs waiting for your team to not suck and bag the win. There are flags that appear which can be captured, though none of my games lasted that long to find out what they do once captured.

Next is a capture point mode which should be familiar to many FPS veterans. Three points on the map, capture them to start generating points and the first team to hit the target wins. There’s respawning here so no fear if you’re bad at games, you’ll get plenty of chances to get back in and try to win.

As you can imagine, this being set in space, there’s not much to look at visually but the developers have certainly done a bang-up job to make it look super slick, even in this early stage of their development cycle. I was also impressed at how smoothly the game ran in terms of performance in this demo too, not one hitch was encountered during gameplay. Additionally, sound is another huge factor in multiplayer based games and in all honesty, with space not exactly being the most acoustic friendly place to be, it can be quite disorienting to figure out where enemies are as the sounds are pretty dull and muted.

That being said this holds some promise and hopefully, it’s taken stock of what happened to Shattered Horizon as zero-g first-person shooters could use another title to re-ignite our lost love for them. Set for release sometime in 2022, it wouldn’t hurt to slap this on your wishlist.