The first match of Marauders, now a closed beta new dieselpunk shooter, was very short. I stood in Rustbucket, a small, dingy frigate with only an engine in a single turret. When I was involved in a dogfight with my fellow Last Bucket, I was flying towards the zone’s main attraction, the Central Space Station. You can board the central space station and plunder its treasure. I rocketed it until it looked pretty dead. I was convinced that I had killed them when a pod in the shape of a small pill hit my ship from the corner of my eye. “BREACHED” read my HUD warning.
I jump off the pilot seat and move to the first-person view on board to see if “violation” means what I’m thinking. I looked downstairs at the airlock and found a gun staring at me. We exchanged some shots, but my single shell tube shotgun can’t beat their MP40. I died, and the first person I hunted down on the asteroid was the new captain of my ship.
It’s these moments that the format of the extract shooter intersects with the Sea of Thieves-style looting, and it’s this moment that I enjoyed Marauder the most. The problem is that the captain of the ship and the offending boarding are actually only a small part of the experience.
In most cases, Marauder is a lot like Escape From Tarkov, but in space, it crawls through dark corridors, plunders as many boxes as possible, and occasionally kills players (or NPCs who mistake them for players) before leaving them alone. increase. You can save everything you find.
Loot bust
My friends and I played for hours this week, and the most interesting thing we managed to plunder was a larger backpack.
I’m a big fan of the fast-growing extract shooter formats, especially Hunt: Showdown’s way of doing things (Opens in a new tab)However, the predators seem to emulate EscapeFromTarkov more closely, including many qualities that keep me from liking it. For one thing, it’s all about loot, and loot is boring.
The only specific goal of the match is to plunder containers and players for what can be sold or used later to make others. In between scratches with the AI Raider, I spent a lot of time opening a cardboard box containing a can of food, a bunch of wires, or a helmet with a lot of shots. It’s a loot that excites me in open world survival sims like DayZ. However, it is of little use in run-based games like Marauder. My friends and I played for hours this week, and the most interesting thing we managed to plunder was a larger backpack.
I like the WWII gun arsenal, but I still don’t feel the looter’s loot cravings. The rusty MP40 and Ruger pistol go surprisingly well with the dirty blue-collar spatial aesthetics. Guns are extremely deadly and battles usually end in seconds. Even a thick armored vest only protects you from a few shots. Predators are pulling other Milsim traps straight out of Tarkov, with realistically slow walking speeds, lack of crosshairs and hit markers, and noticeable delays in actions such as jumps and sprints.
I enjoy immersing myself in a squad-like low stakes mill sim with a real human clunky and simulated body, but the lethargy of control and minimal feedback is a gel in a competitive shooter. I’m more and more confident that it won’t change. When most of the loot I have in my name is on the line, I like to know for sure when my bullets hit the enemy. This may be 350 hours accustomed to the story of Hunt: Showdown, but I really like the way the game balances realism and video gameplay. Movement and shooting are as snappy as Call of Duty, but the gun is extremely deadly and difficult to master.
Ironically, my favorite part of Marauder is the trivial extraction phase, where he returns to the ship and jumps out of the map zone and departs forever. The game relies on your team to remember which airlock you parked your spaceship in. In fact, my friends and I repeatedly forgot when it was time to leave. I pressed the F on the airlock and combed the edge of the station, and when one of them opened, I returned to the time I had forgotten where I parked a typical white sedan in the sea of cars in a local mall.
I think the idea of extraction is that you might encounter enterprising pirates waiting to break through the ship. This is a cool scenario I welcome, but every time I go to the exit I only have free space. My ship was torn several times at the beginning of the match before we plundered something at the station. That makes sense to me — do you really want to spend up to 25 minutes outside the raid zone occasionally waiting for the ship to leave? It seems like a boring way to play, especially given the short travel between the station and the exit. Therefore, the windows for looting are small.
I’m also a little embarrassed by the progress of the predators. I have a lot of money, but not so much to spend it. You can visit a single vendor that offers several random guns and supplies in a timed cycle. So far, these vendors only offer what I already have, or larger items with no inventory space. I was excited to unlock the medkit recipe, but then I realized that I needed an ingredient that was previously found only once.
Currently, Marauders is a cooler game to explain what to play. There aren’t many in this closed beta build. This is the fact that it can prevent Tarkov followers from committing for now, but Marauders definitely outperforms the theme and friendliness. Personally, I think borrowing from Hunt: Showdown is more likely than chasing Tarkov’s obsession with loot. In addition to the goal of finding something cool, why not add a centralized goal that attracts players (such as hunt boss battles)? Or a side goal that exists only in the exterior space zone? It certainly helps give the match a clearer ending than “Our pocket is full, let me guess.”
If you want to check Marauder yourself and decide that I’m completely wrong $ 27 pre-order (Opens in a new tab) Currently, the period is the only way to access the closed beta ending July 26th.
