At this point, any time someone touts a game as "challenging", I’m instantly interested. Whether you increase your own skill or find some cheesy strategy, hard games are rewarding. What a shame Scars Above can’t scratch that itch.
Scars Above is a third person shooter with some Dark Souls-like inspirations. You play as Kate, a scientist who is examining a large alien object before it seemingly transports her to another planet. You have to find the rest of your team, figure out what’s going on, and find a way home.
Combat is the best part of Scars Above. The melee weapon is extremely useless, so the game expects you to use the ranged weapons. Thankfully, there’s a good selection to play with. Each weapon has an element that synergises with another element. For example, if an enemy is in the water, they can freeze faster or you can deal more damage with electricity. But they can also block each other — fire and ice cancel each other out — making for a simple yet intuitive combat system. I found myself swapping between all the weapons during fights.
Unlike other Souls-like games though, you don’t level up by spending a resource but by collecting "knowledge". This is done by scanning enemies and objects in your environment or by collecting cubes that boost it. You spend the points on perks, but these feel very cookie-cutter and standard. None really changed my play-style all that much. It says a lot when the best perk is an increase to healing effectiveness.
You’ll find an assortment of gadgets and consumables. Gadgets, such as a shield, or a grenade that spreads oil that the fire weapon can ignite, use energy and can only be used a few times before they need to be recharged at a pillar. Consumables use fibre to craft a one-time-use item, such as a healing syringe or an ammo pack. I barely used the gadgets as just shooting the enemies was generally the best strategy, and only really used the "remove status effects" consumable.
Sadly, when I said combat was the best part, I kind of meant it was the only good part. The story is ... whatever. Not interesting and engaging enough to be good and not bad enough to be funny. The game feels like it wants to be a kind of Metroidvania, with unlocked abilities opening new paths, but in actuality it’s extremely linear. Backtracking doesn’t lead to anything useful, and most collectables can be found by just stepping off the main path for a minute until you hit a dead end.
Most boss fights are underwhelming. Generally, it’s "fight a bigger version of a smaller enemy", and when it’s not, it’s "shoot the obvious glowing weakpoint and then wait". There is one great boss fight and it uses the fire weapon’s ability to destroy ice to its fullest potential.
The graphics themselves are fine — nothing screenshot-worthy, but definitely a few nice vistas. But the cutscenes are a real let-down. Characters look very "uncanny valley", animations are clunky, and the lip syncing, well, doesn’t. The voice acting is very good, though.
There seems to be a lot of ideas here that were thrown out for one reason or another. Early on, there’s a kind of strange horror experience, but you never really come across the same thing again. Two of the weapons receive a second form, but why not all four? At one point you chase a boss away and when you find it again, the exact same cutscene plays, despite it making no sense in-game.
And after all that, the kicker? It’s nowhere near as hard as I was expecting. There are three difficulty settings, and the hardest ... really wasn’t hard. Yeah, I died a few times, but once I got the hang of the combat, the only thing I died to was frostbite, an environmental hazard. The enemies weren’t a threat, and it didn’t feel like my skill had improved — just that I had grasped the basic mechanics.
Scars Above is just a below-average to middling experience. You can fully play-through the game without a crash, it’s perfectly fine performance wise, but it’s held back by just being not that interesting to play. The story doesn’t engage, the challenge is undercooked, the cutscenes are immersion-breaking, and there’s nothing to really explore for. Looking for a unique or engaging experience? Maybe look elsewhere.
By Michael Robertson
