Some developers really surprise us. So, for example, one of the veterans Bungie Marcus Summer after working on Halo: reach and the initial stage of production of the original Destiny just disappeared from the radars of the gaming industry to suddenly appear after eight years with his new game. Only this time, the ambitions of the creative director of early adventures Masters Chief turned out to be much more modest – his independent studio V1 Interactive consists of only 30 employees and creates a relatively small project for a subsidiary Take-Two Interactive – Private division.
IN Disintegration (PC, Xbox one, Ps4) there will be a story mode where we play as an experienced pilot, Romer Sholl, driving an anti-gravity car with guns and an entire NPC squad. In the universe of the project, humanity was forced to leave the body shell by placing capsules with the nervous system inside soulless machines. But when the time came to return to the bodies of flesh and blood, part of the cyborgs refused to undergo disintegration. The cultists organized a radical movement, tracking the last people and forcing them to integrate. And all dissenters are simply destroyed.
An interesting plot can result in an exciting story game about posthumanism and the search for humanity (but this is not accurate) in the form of a first-person shooter on flying saucers with screensavers between hot missions. Here, someone may recall the ancient Aquanox, however, apart from the announcing video with rendered scenes and several pieces of gameplay, we never saw the campaign. But the developers are already offering to play the closed beta version of the multiplayer.
At the moment, Disintegration Beta has a good workout in a virtual space of cubes, two modes in the format of 5 by 5 and two cards. The first is the capture of three points. The team holding the area near the obelisks fills a special strip. The more points the players hold, the faster the blue indicator fills. The winners are those who will do it faster than opponents.
The second mode is the capture / defense of two bombs. One team is trying to protect containers with explosive shells, while the second seeks to capture them and convey to the base. After the first round, the sides change places.
Despite the seemingly standard mechanics, Disintegration stands out for its concept of controlling aircraft and NPC units. Each player sits inside the anti-gravity, which is equipped with primary and secondary weapons and can fly within about 20 meters above the ground.
The camera shows game actions with a view from the eyes, which at the same time resembles an isometric mode in real-time strategies: your sight is also a cursor, followed by a squad of unplayable characters when you click the right mouse button.
Depending on the selected class (there are seven in the beta version), your protection, control and speed settings change. So armored Warhedz it’s really very difficult and takes a long time to break through with all kinds of main weapons, which can stretch a match in which the team needs to defend the position at the bomb.
In addition, the classes are very different weapons. Someone uses sniper rifles in a set with rocket launchers or a special gun that shoots first-aid kits. Someone are assault rifles and damage boosters. Others can accumulate energy in order to create a small nuclear explosion that takes a long time to recharge, but can destroy several antigravs with their troops in one gulp. There are also fully specialized machines that use arrows that slow down enemies and equipment repair kits.
Fast Lost ronin can circle the opponent’s cars, gradually destroying them at high speed. In our access so far there are two types of treatment classes – Tech noir and King’s guard. The first improves the performance of NPCs and can heal players’ gliders, the second – throws a sphere healing in the area.
It is the correct combination of classes in the team, the timely use of secondary weapons and infantry abilities that are the key to success in local fights.
It should be understood that NPCs are not immortal here – they can die. In this case, it is necessary to collect a capsule with the nervous system, after which there will be a fairly long rollback until rebirth.
Classes are a kind of grouping, each of which has its own unique visual style. Glider King’s guard literally painted with antique patterns for a horse-drawn carriage, and the playable character himself is a cyborg knight in medieval armor. Neon dreams differ in the style of cyberpunk – bright luminous costumes, futuristic gliders. Warhedz reminiscent in style of Brotherhood of Steel and the Raiders of the series Fallout. Class Lost ronin refers to Asian culture, machine guns of which are similar to retractable katanas.
Already at the beta stage, all classes have customization for the points that you earn by completing daily tasks. You can configure the pilot, the glider itself, infantry and fan holographic gestures that appear in front of the glider for a few seconds.
To balance the gameplay, designers limit the choice of the same classes to two per team as in Overwatch. But at the same time, even in beta, matchmaking is pretty fast (on average, searching on a PC takes 10-15 seconds), since you choose a role after searching for another nine players and you can change it between rebirths, and there are seven classes instead of three.
It is also very important to use NPCs. They have their own rechargeable abilities that can save your trough in a hot shootout. In addition, in the same battles for bombs, the players themselves cannot carry an explosive device – this is what your units do. Therefore, the choice of the route to the base and the protection of the character become an important part of the general tactics.
The speed of the game is not high – Disintegration is definitely created for an audience that is tired of the too arcade gameplay of some modern shooters. But the right combination of weapons and competent tactics allows you to significantly deal with opponents faster.
At the beginning, the game seems too unusual and incomprehensible, but then, when you understand it, it becomes fun and interesting, especially if you play with friends in the same team.
What really disappointed us was the quality of the cards. If the location in the ruined city just looks uninteresting and graphically outdated for a whole generation, then the area in the landfill is a junk pile of metal boxes and containers mixed with wrecked ships. At the same time, the picture is angular, and objects can be loaded right on the fly. Although in terms of gameplay it plays normally.
True, due to the gray-brown gamut, enemy models even with colored contours can merge with the environment, which is inconvenient when an action with several antigravs and their troops in tight streets becomes too stressful. But even so, it does not cause problems such as, for example, in some games in the series Call of duty.
Fortunately, the developers have thought out respawn points. They are always static and protected by strong turrets that almost instantly destroy enemy units. These areas have several exits, so there are no situations when you are not allowed to get out of respawn. This also allowed making locations more compact, and there was no need to look for opponents for a long time.
But for many, this will be a minus, since multiplayer locations simply do not give freedom for large equipment. If you were waiting for a card in the spirit Avalanche of Halo 3, where it was possible to travel freely in vast territories and was wide, then Disintegration, judging by the beta version, offers very compact rather corridor areas. Of course we are talking only about multiplayer. What will be in the plot we do not know yet.
On the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti Disintegration Beta works stably in 4K at 60 frames per second on epic graphics settings without tearing on the monitor with G sync module. We did not find any friezes and the game loads very quickly. But once a bug happened – with respawn the character was under the floor textures without the ability to get out.
At the very beginning, the ping kept at around 200-240, which is why the slow classes, such as King’s Guard shooting crossbows, were disgustingly controlled, but the developers somehow quickly reduced the delays to a relatively adequate 60-90.
On a second computer with NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Ti, which was connected to a monitor without G-Sync, there was a small but annoying tearing. At the same time, for some reason, there is no function to set up vertical synchronization in the game. We hope this point will be fixed in the release version.
Beta for Xbox one x Works at 30 FPS with problems. During matches, constant friezes occur. There is a possibility that the network code is to blame, and not the brakes of the game itself. Management is very viscous and not very responsive – on the controller it is simply unpleasant to aim and play. There is no choice of graphics mode. But this is still a closed technical beta. Developers should fix all problems closer to release.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZC68Q7A6Jg
Disintegration – This is at least an interesting conceptual project that changes the perception paradigm of online shooters, which is very cool, because a fresh look at established mechanics in any genre is always welcome. The need to think tactically, controlling infantry units, but not die in the heat of battle on a glider, gives new sensations. But at the moment, the game on the PC is still raw, but playing the Xbox One version is simply unpleasant. What’s with the option for Ps4 we will write a little later when we test it. It can be seen that the project lacks a budget: graphics and maps could be better, and the characters need to be slightly rebalanced. But, nevertheless, we got an incentive to closely monitor the development of the game. Well, of course, we really hope for an interesting story mode.
The authors – ACE, Asarafanov, Blaze.
Editing – Skyerist.
