14 DAY TRIAL // Floating monsters are spitting green poison at me but I move fast enough that there’s no chance of getting hit. Of course, my overconfidence means I get hit from behind by machine gun fire and I lose a significant amount of health.
Switching to the shotgun seems like a good idea. I use one shot to blow away one enemy and stagger the other and then finish him off. I return to the flying opponents, who have closed the distance and managed to hit me, and strafe until they are dead.
I go left to search the big combat space for some health and maybe armor, using the pilebunker to kill the enemies that come at me in small groups. I’m hoping to maybe get a better weapon before I search the rest of the sprawling spaceport for the keycards required to make progress. There are plenty of creatures out there that really want to kill me.
Supplice is developed by Mekworx and published by Hyperstrange. The game is now in Early Access on Steam. The title offers a classic FPS experience, focused on fun combat.
Gamers will take on the role of an engineer, working in the far future to create new worlds for humanity to settle. But the mysterious Flux Gate malfunctions and allows trans-dimensional monsters to assault a colony. With everyone else dead, it is up to the player to destroy all invaders and try to fix the issue so that no other worlds are threatened. Don’t expect a deep and emotion-filled narrative.
It’s all about the action. Supplice is a first-person shooter with a retro approach. The player’s avatar is fast, the weapons will be instantly familiar to anyone who knows the genre, and combat relies on constant movement and decent aim.
The pilebunker, which uses no ammo and has a Shockwave alternate fire, feels so good to use, especially in tight quarters, that it made the other weapons less attractive. Still, it’s important to choose the right one for the situation and for the enemy type that’s the biggest threat.
Our engineer cannot jump, which feels a little odd at first, but the game has good level design. There are plenty of nooks and crannies to explore for secrets and every combat arena is filled with items and boosts. Opponents aren’t very smart but they can easily overwhelm when big groups strike from all directions.
Supplice does not yet have a clear campaign structure or too much in the way of narrative. The kinetic element of combat feels good but I want to see weirder opponents and more imagination when it comes to combat spaces.
Supplice does a good job on its retro look. The graphics are chunky, with big pixels that make enemies even more alien when they close the distance. It’s not how Doom actually looked but how fans remember it. The level design is decent but a little more variety and weirdness would not go amiss. The soundtrack is very good, designed to push players forward and up their adrenaline level, and the combat effects are decent.
Conclusion
The main issue is there’s little to separate this experience from the many other shooters from the retro space. The Early Access period gives the studio space to try out new things and find a way to innovate. I’ve had fun with Supplice’s combat but it needs more to keep me playing through a bigger campaign.
A preview key was provided by the publisher
