Scars Above is one of Gamescom 2022’s most promising games
Scars Above sees a team of skilled scientists forced to survive on an alien and hostile planet after a crash landing. In these stories, how we got here doesn’t matter, but how we move forward is what makes the experience truly compelling.
Scars Above, offers up a frantic action shooter, complete with a world to explore, puzzles to solve, and alien beasts to gun down. Kate is our protagonist, and she is a talented fighter as well as a natural genius. As you discover new materials and defeat new monsters, Kate will scan things, adding them to an ever-expanded log book, complete with creature models, strengths, weaknesses, and more.
To fight against these creatures, Kate has VERA, a weapon that can use different elemental abilities once upgrades are uncovered. A basic electrified shot starts you off, with access to fire and ice gunfire coming soon after. Monsters are affected by these attacks in different ways, but more interestingly, so is the landscape. An obvious example is that a monster sitting in a pool of water will take more damage from electrified attacks – we wouldn’t expect any less. More interesting is when you’re able to use fire blasts to shoot ice out from underneath the feet of monsters, freezing them in the waters below.
As Kate fires her weapon, she’ll also be dodging and rolling around the battlefield, as monsters have a variety of melee, ranged, and AoE attacks. With more enemies comes more danger, so it’s essential to whittle numbers down quickly so that you don’t have to fear the jaws or claws of bigger, meaner creatures while rolling around.
When not fighting aliens, you’ll primarily be exploring the alien world, which is essentially a labyrinth. This isn’t an open-world game where you ride a motorbike across the horizon — it’s a compact experience, with linear corridors leading to wide open chambers on the surface – or just below the surface – of the alien planet.
This is all backed up by some excellent visual flair. Creatures look incredible, and characters are realistically rendered. The world itself is the star of the show though, with ancient alien technology blending against foreign plants and wildlife. If we’re going to make a complaint, the facial animations look a bit bad, currently. However this isn’t Mass Effect: Andromeda, and you won’t spend much of your time in cutscenes looking over the cast. Scars Above is, from what we’ve seen, set to be a fairly lonely but incredibly promising adventure.
Written by Dave Aubrey on behalf of GLHF.