14 DAY TRIAL // The Red Solstice is a tactical twin-stick shooter that aims to offer a complex and fast-paced cooperative experience for up to eight players.
The game is being made by Ironward Games, and is currently on Steam Early Access, after completing a successful Kickstarter campaign earlier this year in April.
The devs have been hard at work, and they've just released the beta on Steam, as promised, and we were fortunate enough to get our hands on it.
Ironward aims to deliver an experience that's a hybrid between the custom maps in Starcraft, with a bit of a Syndicate vibe, a sort of real-time XCOM that you can enjoy with your friends.
The game is set on Mars, sometime in the distant future, and its dark sci-fi setting translates into a lot of rust and red hues, to go with the locale. A hundred years after Earth was ravaged by a brutal virus, humans are busily terraforming Mars, when all of a sudden a violent storm hits the planet.
The Red Solstice plays from a top-down perspective, features randomized maps, and challenges team to survive through wave upon wave of mutant abominations, while at the same time having to roam the map and satisfy the randomized mission objectives.
As the mission grows in length, the strength and aggression of the enemy swarm will also scale up, and players are hard-pressed to keep on the move, constantly improving their arsenal and leveling up to gain additional abilities and strengthen the ones they have, lest they run the risk of finding themselves overwhelmed.
There are different classes to choose from, different weapon loadouts depending on class, even different ammo that you can tailor to whatever mission you intend to play, and whatever enemies you might think will be prevalent, and, of course, there are also various special abilities and perks that you can choose before embarking on a mission.
The action itself is pretty solid, definitely fast-paced, and rewards teamplay. You can get a fast-walking class, run into a building, and scavenge for supplies while the others are busily keeping the streets clean, fill your backpack with stuff and then catch up with the rest and share your spoils.
There are also mutants that can poison you, which tends to have a rather detrimental effect on your ability to stay alive, and you can even break your limbs while fending off the hordes of enemies. Luckily, there are special skills that you get when you level up, that can deal with such specific situations, and a medic can keep the team topped up and heal such afflictions.
The fact that maps are randomized means that you'll get a different experience each time you play, and that resource allocations and objectives will change, as will monster spawn points, and you'll have to adapt to the new conditions in order to stand a chance of survival.
The game will also include a single-player campaign, but for now getting some friends and role-playing your favorite StarCraft cutscene or pretending you're in Starship Troopers, and that the meteor that stroke Buenos Aires also carried some unknown mutagenic pathogen is the best time you can have with The Red Solstice.
In addition to this, you can also issue orders and outline waypoints and objectives for the team, and shooting things in the face is always fun, especially when you can customize your cannon fodder's loadout and abilities, so the game exhibits a ton of potential, from what I've seen so far.
The powerful customization options are definitely one of my favorite points, with weapons being designed to cover a wide variety of roles, from light weapons that reduce armor to explosive weapons that deal more area-of-effect damage but less single-target punishment, with different ranges, cooldowns and ammo consumption, which means that you'll pretty much get to build your very own Space Marine, tailored to your preferred playing style.
Furthermore, the customization options also extend to the random maps, as you can assign them various modifiers that allow you to control their difficulty, and even objectives and play style.
If you liked the old Warcraft 3 and StarCraft custom maps where you roamed a map fighting a zerg horde, you'll also find The Red Solstice to your liking, as it's pretty much a buffed-up and modernized version of that.
