Interstellar Marines

Written by Nathan Carter on 11/7/2014 for PC  

Interstellar Marines is one of the various games available to buy into on Steam Early Access. Now I know a lot of people have strong feelings towards Early Access games as it's almost like buying into a game on Kickstarter. You are making an investment and unfortunately you aren't always a good working product in the end. The good news is that Interstellar Marines shows tons of promise and most importantly, for an Early Access game, it offers a ton of fun as soon as you get into the game. 

At the point where I started playing, Interstellar Marines had three game modes available to play. Single player, online multiplayer and training grounds. Immediately I decided to jump in and give the online multiplayer a try. I managed to get a decent amount of games in but as of now you have to hope that other people are online as well. Being that this is an Early Access title, there aren't going to be tons of people online at once and you you can't expect there to be full lobbies at this point. Luckily though you should be able to get into some form on online multiplayer even if there are only a few people playing. 

Interstellar Marines online multiplayer has a team domination type game mode where teams control certain parts of the map. The difference between this form of domination is that there are a rather large number of points to control. This is important because this can also change the flow of the match. Everytime you or a teammate dies, they have to sit out for a rather substantial respawn period. This is of course unless someone on your team can capture a control point on the map. Doing so will respawn someone from your team back into the match. I absolutely loved this aspect of the game as it really gives each game a tug of war type feel to it with teams constantly going back and forth with an advantage on the other. The game can end in one of two ways. Either by capturing all of the points on the map or by eliminating the entire enemy team. For all the games I played, I had a ton of fun as I sit out, praying for a team member to capture a point so I could get back into the fight. It kinda reminded me of the dodgeball games you would play in gym class where you are eliminated until someone catches a ball from the opposite team. There were only two guns available to use including an SMG and an Assault Rifle. I couldn't find any way to unlock new weapons in the my playing so I am unsure if they just aren't there at this time or if you unlock more when you level up enough. 

The one thing however that I absolutely loved about the multiplayer is how the maps can change throughout the match. This is something that I have been begging companies to put into their multiplayer games for years. For instance, one one map, we all started in complete darkness. The only light we had were the flickering lights in the warehouse to see. Your guns do come equipped with both a flashlight and laser sight and while turning those on may help you see, you also give away your position to enemies. It forces you to play smart, think when and where you use your equipment. Then throughout the match, lights in the warehouse started to turn on so we could all see. The terrain of the arena also started to change as the match went on as well. Another example would be a map where again we started out in complete darkness but this time the map was outside. It was also raining, complete with a thunderstorm as well. As you would expect, lightning would occur at varying times which lit up the entire map. It was so much fun running around the map, having lightning light everything up only to see two enemies running in the distance. After a while, the rain stopped and the sun started coming up. I absolutely love this. I love how the maps themselves aren't just backdrops for you and an enemy team to fight on. It's as part of the match as you are the enemy team are. This is one of those early access games that provides tons of fun right off the bat and I am really excited to see what will be included in the future. 

It's also important to note that the multiplayer mode, from what I played, holds up pretty well considering that it's an Early Access game. I didn't encounter any serious problems and I certainly didn't feel like missing features you might see in other online shooters hurt the experience. Yes, you only have two guns and as far as I saw there were no grenades or anything like that but it is exciting to see how the game will add more weapons to the game overtime. My biggest problem is that the chat doesn't appear on the screen. You have to press the chat button to bring up a pop up box with all of the chat in it and this is incredibly annoying as you can't see the chat and play at the same time. It would be nice if it was on screen while you play so you could communicate better with your teammates. 

You can test out all of the maps in the Playground mode which I assume is where you can play the multiplayer portion via local lan. I went into the mode a couple of times and it seems like you could check out all of the maps offered in multiplayer but it didn't seem like there was anything else to this. Of course I could be an idiot and didn't know what I was supposed to do or it could be updated with more features in the future.  

The game also does include a single player story but unfortunately I didn't get very far in it. It does show promise however. I made my way around a space station in almost complete darkness completing various tasks and let me tell you, the game can get pretty scary. There is no music and very little sound effects but even so it didn't make me feel any easier. I'll be making my way around and robots would come after me relentlessly. The reason I didn't get very far into the single player is because it seems like it could be a very difficult game. I kept dying over and over again as the robots would drain my health rather quickly and it seemed like there weren't any checkpoints or save spots along the way. You die and you have to start right at the very beginning again. Now, maybe I didn't look hard enough and maybe there is a way to save the game, but either way I'm not going to knock the game for it. After all, this still is an early access, work in progress game. 

There is already tons of fun to be had in the multiplayer and they are planning on adding tons of more content into the game before its eventual release including a full fledged single player mode which will support co-op, a character development and skill system, open ended level design and fully customizable weapons. I already had tons of fun with Interstellar Marines and I am very interested in seeing how the game will shape over as it's continuously updated overtime. This could very well become my new multiplayer shooter addiction.