TerraTech Legion blasts new tracks through the Bullet Heaven genre

TerraTech Legion rolls into the enemy-infested wastelands, guns blazing, electricity arcing and explosives… exploding all around. A fresh take on the bullet heaven style, it’s inherently addictive and satisfying to put together successful runs filled with screen-clearing chaos.

There’s still a good way to go, from what’s shown in the demo through to a fully fleshed-out release, but the core experience is already solid and shows plenty of potential.

Any time there’s a new genre and game style emerging, there’s bound to be imitators and clones. Vampire Survivor remains a sensation to this day, constantly updated and with mini expansions, but as it leans into its retro style and amusing jank, there’s so much scope and potential for other developers and gaming universes to riff off its ideas and feel different.

For TerraTech Legion, that’s in driving a vehicle from a top-down view, with all the tricks that this lends in manoeuvring around enemies and obstacles. With turning circles accelerating and potentially quite cumbersome and lumbering handling for a beefy vehicle, you need to pilot in a more considered way.

And then there’s the vehicle construction element, which is adapted from TerraTech proper. You start with a pre-formed vehicle, with dozens of attachment points on the top, sides and rear to bolt weapons and augmentations onto, but after even just a few of these are awarded, you might start to feel constrained, needing to bolt extra surfaces or extension arms onto your vehicle to gain more space. It’s a fun and easy to grasp vehicle builder, items snapping into place to those mounting points.

But how do you get those new upgrades? As is typical for this genre, you need to collect gems that are dropped by fallen enemies, filling up a bar that then heralds an upgrade crate to give you a choice of three new weapons. You can also pick up augment crates dropped by enemies that are then opened as you reach this level up stage. This is also the point at which you get to add things to your vehicle, and you’re given freedom to tear everything back down and reconfigure it to match a new or evolving plan for your build. Need more space for guns? Perhaps sticking augment modules underneath extra blocks will give you more topside space?

There’s a few different ways that you can play, a handful of different damage types with multiple different weapons that let you combine them with buffs and upgrades, or you can lean in on kinetic damage and crash through hordes with hefty boosts. It took one run for me to really figure out my successful strategy, bolting a whole battery of miniguns and railguns pointing to the side, backed up by some more general weapons covering the other sides. The key thinking to this was that it would allow me to effectively strafe around the main hordes of enemies and bosses, while forward or rear-facing weapons forced me hand to less-desirable driving style, and omni-directional weapons have less oomph.

And let me tell you, this was exceptionally satisfying, with the railguns giving a bit of range before the miniguns could open up as enemies get within range, just spewing out bullets in an angry hum of metal. With a bunch of ballistic damage boosters attached, I could make short work of pretty much everything, barring the bosses.

The demo level has two bosses on show, which throw a little bit of bullet hell back your way. A large, bulbous mid-boss appears partway through and repeatedly lifts off and lands before sending out waves of energy projectiles that you need to dodge – which is no mean feat when also dealing with a large sweep of regular enemies! – while the level ending boss summoned glowing orange orbs for enemies to spawn from, as well as sending out laser beams to cordon you in for a short time. They’re decent bosses, though it’s often a bit tricky to figure out in the latter boss has its beams at ground level when it’s moving around. I definitely want to see more variety in the full game, and more challenging attack patterns.

Of course, this is just a demo, so there’s plenty that’s missing and promised for the full release of TerraTech Legion. More starter vehicles, more biomes, more enemies and bosses, and an emerging metagame that taps into all the resources you can collect while playing. I’d also like to see more emphasis put on specialising down different weapon types and damage synergies, where it currently feels like I can be a bit too general with my choices. This is a solid starting point, though, a vehicle core which Payload Studios can bolt more ideas onto, and I’m keen to see more.