The Anacrusis

by Aethyna Jan 18, 2022 | 1 Votes | 66 Played | 0 Reviews

8 rate

Genres:

First Person Shooter

Graphics:

Labels:

Co-op , Sci-Fi , Aliens

Platforms:

Publishers:

Stray Bombay Inspired by the legendary Left 4 Dead (L4D) series, The Anacrusis is a first-person co-op shooter that puts you along with 3 other players as the sole survivors of an alien infection aboard a colony spaceship. Battle against the seemingly endless alien hordes as you make your way to the escape hatch! Play Now Similar Games

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Summary Plotline Gameplay Community Graphics/ Sound Conclusion

Summary

Inspired by the legendary Left 4 Dead (L4D) series, The Anacrusis is a first-person co-op shooter that puts you along with 3 other players as the sole survivors of an alien infection aboard a colony spaceship. Battle against the seemingly endless alien hordes as you make your way to the escape hatch. The game features elite alien creatures that may bring to mind the special zombies in L4D (there are some unique ones), horde events, and more.

Plotline

The game doesn’t really explain the background much, but from the little intro it has and the setting itself which you can experience once you dive into a game, you can probably guess what had happened to the poor people on the spaceship.

Basically, from what I’ve gathered, The Anacrusis is a massive spaceship that is designed to house human’s first colonizers, who are separated into 4 factions. Once a habitable planet is found, they are supposed to become the planet’s pioneers. They have searched far and wide, but before find that ideal planet, they had the misfortune of stumbling upon hostile alien matter.

You see, the alien isn’t like something from Aliens vs Predator – it’s much, much smaller than that and it’s infectious. Spreading rapidly among the people on the ship, it turned the humans into reptilian-looking, zombie-like aliens. Some even went further, turning into grotesque alien monsters with dangerous yet unique abilities, whether it is being able to goo people up, or being able to harpoon its prey via long, pointy tendrils.

Thankfully, there are survivors on the ship – coincidentally, one from each faction – and they’ve decided to band together and try to escape from the doomed spaceship.

Gameplay

If you’ve religiously played Left4Dead back when it was all the rage, or maybe even now, you’ll find this game very easy to dive into, mainly because of how similar they feel in terms of gameplay. You can, for instance, equip a Health Scanner, which works just like a standard health pack, and a health booster a.k.a. the adrenaline shot.

You can have only 1 grenade-type item at any time as well. Though, unlike in L4D where the grenades are more… realistic, the game really goes wild with some of the grenades on offer, such as the Vortex grenade, which I guess works a bit like the pipe bomb in L4D by drawing all enemies in.

For weapons, the game gives you a default pistol with unlimited ammo, a primary weapon that you can choose from between a blaster (shotgun), SMG, and a (plasma) rifle, and a special weapon that you can only pick up by scouring around the place, with my personal favorite being the turret. Both primary and special weapons have limited ammo, but the game gives you enough chances to get new weapons or to “recharge” your ammo so it’s rare you’ll find yourself having no ammo at all. However, do take note that friendly fire is possible here and if you’re blocking your teammates’ view, make sure to make use of the crouch function.

Since there’s no melee weapon that you can use nor can you push the aliens away, the game gives you a pulse ability. With three charges available, you can use this to push enemies away so you can shoot at them better. It’s useful while you’re reloading too.

In terms of enemies, L4D and The Anacrusis share some similarities here too. There’s the Brute a.k.a. the Charger which charges in (that also allows it to “charge” across gaps and flimsy barriers like glass) and pins players; and there’s the Grabber which pierces its pointy tendrils through your body and drags you towards it, like the Smoker does in L4D.

The Gooper, on the other hand, is similar to a Boomer in the sense that it spews… well, goo, but unlike the Boomer’s puke, the goo will freeze a player upon contact, essentially putting you at the mercy of any attacking aliens.

There are also spiked balls that tend to clump up together, blocking corridors. They function very much like a Witch in L4D and will only attack if you are being “noisy” such as by running past them (or attempting to), or by shooting at them. From time to time, the game will throw alien hordes at you, just like in L4D.

The Anacrusis isn’t just lifting ideas off L4D though – the game builds upon it by introducing some tricky specials of their own. There’s the much-hated Flasher. When engaged, it’ll blind the entire screen with bright yellow light and also call in a horde of normal aliens to swarm you. There’s also the Spawner, which is a rare “special”. Instead of attacking you directly, the alien spawns other turret-like aliens which will spew some sort of yellow goo at you. The longer it stays alive, the more alien turrets it’ll spawn, so you’d best get rid of it… fast!

As you might have expected, the goal in every mission you play is to get to the next “safehouse” (or “saferoom”). With the campaign though, you’ll get to run through different locations around the ship, whether it is the crew quarters or the mall, in each Episode. There are 5 episodes in all, but only the first three are accessible for now.

Besides the story-driven campaign, the game also offers Quick Play mode and a Weekly Challenge mode where there’s a leaderboard involved.

I haven’t been able to unlock any new skins yet but I would safely assume that you can unlock new ones by successfully completing runs. The more you play, the more you’ll get to collect.

Community

Maybe it’s because the game’s is currently enjoying a nice surge in players thanks to being recently released, getting into a game by finding randoms can be pretty fast. Plus, if players do end up dropping out of the game, you’ll then get an AI replacement that is occasionally competent. The AI may not be the best shot or knows what buttons to press, but at least they know the map well enough and will try to rescue you if you’re down.

Latency seems fairly good overall. I’ve done a couple of runs and I’ve only encountered some lag spikes in a few of them; spikes that resolved themselves really quickly.

However, for a game that’s solely online co-op, I think it’s an oversight on the dev’s part for them to not add in a Private Group function for people who would love to play with friends but may not be able to get all 4 player slots filled. Currently, without the Private Group function, the game will automatically fill in the empty slots with randoms, some of whom might end up becoming trolls.

The communication options here can be a bit limited too. Unless you’re the sort who loves using the mic when playing games, or if you don’t have a mic, there’s no other way to communicate with your teammates besides the Ping feature.

At the moment, you’re forced to have a ready team of four. If not, you’ll have to add in Randoms. Cannot create a private group
More preset communications options would be nice, in addition to simply Ping.

Graphics/ Sound

The graphics here are pretty fantastic. Just check out the screenshot entitled “Grabber” and you’ll see what I mean. Due to its retro-futuristic theme, the game also focuses on bright colors that often line the corridors, the walls and even the floor. The sound and music works really great here too, matching perfectly to the theme and to whatever action that’s going on on-screen.

Conclusion

Whichever way you cut this, The Anacrusis will be compared with the legendary Left 4 Dead series for as long as it is available, and rightly so. The game lifts plenty of elements that made L4D fun to play, adds some new stuff of their own, and gives itself a retro-future makeover. Of course, being an early access title, the game has some downsides. For instance, the blaster (a.k.a. shotgun) doesn’t pack enough of a punch as it should.

So, all in all, The Anacrusis is definitely promising, but will it actually measure up? We’ll just have to wait and see. For now, unless you have extra cash to spare, maybe you’ll want to keep this in your wishlist and follow the development of the game.

New Game Added: The Anacrusis

by Aethyna Jan 18, 2022

by Aethyna Jan 14, 2022

Season Zero of The Anacrusis releases with crossplay in Steam Early Access & Xbox Game Preview today, bringing players three episodes of this sci-fi co-op shooter to explore