Abyssus Preview – Shooting stuff underwater together

Abyssus is a first-person shooter roguelike that offers plenty of co-op pew-pewing, both with your friends and with randoms, but despite having some really interesting aspects to the game flow and weapon design, it might not be doing quite enough to stand out from the preposterously huge crowd that it’s a part of. To tell the truth, I don’t know how any incoming game can manage it though, so it might not be an issue.

The standout feature of Abyssus is its setting. This is a “brinepunk” world, which basically means we’re dealing with underwater stuff and have some big old helmets protecting us. It’s a bit eldritch in its design, or at least will feel that way for anyone who’s played any of the Call of Cthulhu games. The enemies here aren’t unknowable horrors, though; they’re mostly just little golem guys.

While there is some enemy variety, the end result of nearly all of them doesn’t offer much actual change in how you approach them. You just have to shoot stuff, and while some will run after you and some will attack from range, it’s rare that an enemy outside of a boss encounter will actually challenge you to do anything more than start blasting.

Of course, a key part of any roguelike is build variety that changes how you play, and here that’s dictated by a couple of choices. The first of these is your loadout. You can choose from among a few different weapons and then augment those weapons to have different behaviours, secondary fire options, and abilities. Then, when you’re actually in a run, you find obelisks to get power from that are all elementally themed. You can diversify these for lots of different options, or if you’re lucky, you can commit to a single element and just get a huge boost in power.

I don’t think that these do enough to really feel diverse, though. Sure, a wind explosion looks different to a shadow explosion, but does it really matter? No, not especially. You’re not really changing the way that you play the game with any of these power-ups, that’s mostly done via your weapon selection. The result is that, as with the enemies, runs just feel kind of samey.

None of these feels bad, though. I realise it probably feels like I dislike this game because I’ve been complaining about it, but that’s not the case. Abyssus is a fine game with beautiful graphics and a really fun setting. Yet it doesn’t do enough to push beyond that into the realms of a truly great game. Of course, these are early days and there’s sure to be more beyond what’s on show in the Steam Next Fest demo.

There’s a chance that a lot of this gets mucked about with between now and the full release of the game in August, and I hope that it does, because I always want games to be good. As it stands though, Abyssus is a pretty standard FPS roguelike that’s got a lot of interesting concepts, but not enough clean execution and variety.