The Scourge Project Review

The Scourge Project is a four player co-operative third person shooter from Tragnarion Studios. A relative newcomer to the industry, founded in late 2003 and based in sunny Mallorca with only nine members, they have rapidly grown in size by obtaining developers, programmers and artists from Sega, Ubisoft and Eidos so they are not short on talent by any means. The game is utilising Epic's Unreal Engine 3 in an attempt to deliver a true co-op driven story to the players, which means even in single-player, all four of the games protagonists will be present with AI driving the empty seats.

A bundle of Episodes One and Two is what is currently available to players on Steam at a rather attractive price of £12.99/$19.99/€14.99, so straight from the get go it's appealing to players on a budget. I mean a four player co-op storyline with around 5-10 hours of gameplay (depending on the skill, or lack thereof, of your co-op partners), with multi-player too for a bargain price, what's not to like so far?

The story goes something like this. You're part of Echo Squad, a band of mercenaries hired by the Tarn Initiative to disrupt the operations of the power thirsty Nogari Corporation. In these first two episodes you have two main objectives, rescue Tarn's double agent Dr. Reisbeck and to recover a meteorite fragment that the Nogari Corporation used to develop Ambrosia, a strange new power source which has taken complete control of the worlds' economy. En route to your infiltration point, you're sabotaged by Alpha Squad, who were supposed to be your escort to the mission, forcing you to crash land on Nogari Island, now only with the aid of your team will you be able to accomplish your mission.

Each of the four protagonists, Stonewall, Amp, Shade and Mass, are playable characters, each with their own unique cinematics explaining parts of their back story with flashes of a possible fate for the squad. Each character also has their own special ability which uses Ambrosia, in addition to this skill every character may project a shield which depletes your Ambrosia Custard meter. Apart from the cut-scenes and special ability, there are no other positives or negatives in picking one of the protagonists, you aren't limited to what weapons you can use or anything class based so it's really down to your own personal preference on whom you wish to play, but there will be fights over who has to be forced to play as Mass, I mean who would willingly pick a ginger Scotsman?

Now I know what you're probably thinking about now. Third Person Shooter? Cover system? It's just a poor Gears of War copy! Well you would be wrong and it's an unnecessary comparison, too many people inevitably compare X game to Y game because Z similarity and then X game gets a slating because of it rather than being viewed upon it's own merits or problems. So let's delve deeper into the game itself. The controls are your standard FPS affair, 'W.S.A.D' for movement mouse to aim and shoot, job done so the vast majority of FPS gamers will be able to pick this up very quickly, however we experienced very high sensitivity while aiming, even with the in-game slider down to minimum and our own mice settings on low the game still felt very twitchy in terms of visual movement and can take a couple of attempts to adjust to it.

Once used to the 'twitchyness' of the sensitivity the movements feel smooth and natural, taking cover is as easy as one button and from that cover you can either blind fire your weapon or risk getting hit by peeking out to aim. The weaponry is pretty much your standard affair ranging from a sidearm to a form of rocket launcher, so while the selection is only nine weapons it is enough to do the job amicably. Additionally the weapons dropped by the Nogari forces have the chance to have modifications attached which are highlighted in orange as you run over them so you may find a shotgun with a laser sight or an assault rifle with red dot scope and under-barrel grenade launcher. These extra drops appear to be randomly generated so you're never sure of what you'll get your hands on.

Visually the game is above average, but the engine has not been pushed to it's limits at all, while things do look nice, at times you will feel like it could have done with that extra level of eye candy put into the game. However for a relatively new developer and the price point of the game I can understand why the game looks as it does. We all know that it's the gameplay that counts rather than how shiny it looks. The voice acting is above par, well it couldn't be any worse than Just Cause 2, and the sounds overall in the game are pretty solid so no complaints there. The game is a hoot when you are playing with three friends, with the hard difficulty providing a nice challenge making sure you don't rush through the content in five minutes flat, so I would recommend playing on the highest difficulty the game offers to get the best experience.

Multi-player wise, you'll get a choice of four game modes. Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, Capture the Flag and Frontiers. The first three I'm sure you'll know the basics of them, where Frontiers mode is essentially a capture and hold game mode akin to the Control Point maps of Team Fortress 2. The game supports 16 players in total however there are no apparent dedicated servers, instead the game has adopted a player hosted lobby system which is a worrying trend these days as you can never be sure of a lag free or stable game, I've always been a fan of dedicated servers as I know the game won't be disrupted if someone rage quits a match, yet if that rage quitter is the host, it's game over man... game over!

All of the modes pit the Tarn Initiative against the Nogari Corporation, and each side has four player models to choose from which is not a great deal of choice. It's not so bad playing as the Nogari as everyone is in a uniform but when your choice as the Tarn are basically the games four protagonists, it's just weird seeing multiple players using the Amp model on your team. However this is a moot point as multi-player is bloody good fun.

Now the game does have a few glaring issues which we encountered during our time playing The Scourge Project. The AI is pretty rudimentary and on multiple occasions the enemy AI have completely ignored us as it ran a path to it's next cover location, even if that meant running past all four of us. The teammate AI will just blindly try to revive you even if that means getting shot in the face endangering the mission as if just one person dies then you'll have to restart the chapter. We've seen clipping issues where player models are appearing to hold a weapon that's different to the one equipped, player models disappearing into a mechanical crane arm as we're stood upon a container awaiting to be moved so we can progress in the level.

We've even had occasions where we are all trapped in a room as the game has not loaded the next scripted event which opens the door in front of us, forcing the host to restart from the last checkpoint, or even worse, restart the chapter.

It does feel like the game could have used a little extra play testing however as I stated before, I can overlook the issues as this is their first game on the PC and I'm sure we can give indie developers more slack than their mainstream counterparts as we all have to start somewhere. Even with the current issues the game is still a damn fine purchase at the cheap price point of £12.99/$19.99/€14.99 and definitely one for the Steam collection, especially when you bug your friends to do the same for co-op shenanigans.