Marauders, Team17’s new take on the traditional survival shooter docked at WASD this week and we got faced the dangers of the great beyond.
Marauders landed at WASD, and barely weeks after unveiling an alternate future where humankind took to the stars atop a mix of desperation, sweat, and the industrious appetite for more resources, we got our very own tour of the cosmos.
Tarkov in space. Let’s get that comparison out of the way. if you think that Team17’s newest title is simply a reskin of the violently inaccessible shooter then you will be in for a few surprises. At its heart Maurders is a survival shooter. It plunges players into a first person scrap in among contained maps in an online hit and run that looks nothing like you’ve seen before.
The assumption that Marauders is simply Tarkov with a new skin is disproven as we descend into a game that seems certain to sand out among stars. After navigating a standard loadout screen, we’ve fille our limited inventory with water, bandages, automatic rifles, pistols, and knives that play into the idea that Marauders is still mired in the industrialisation of the 1990s. There’s also a range of relevant ammunition, era fitting headgear, as well as personal protection that doesn’t exactly look setup for the cold reaches of outer space. That’s the first indication that marauders will be a little soft on the realism, but this sort of dieselpunk or decopunk design was never likely to take on the Expanse for accuracy.
While the loadout system feels familiar, the rest of our time with marauders is a breath of cold hard vacuum. Dropping into a metallic maze, there’s a sense that the opening level design is something out of Wolfenstein’s dragged out into the future. Then suddenly it becomes apparent that this isn’t an opening level, and the harsh metallic walls are the inner hull of a small spacecraft. Eventually bypassing he escape pods and locating the periscope, Marauders quickly changes pace, throwing us into a bout of naval warfare. Sure, we can see our enemies if we squint really hard into the coldest reaches of an expansive asteroid field, but the entire thing feels like a WWII naval encounter, with small ship whizzing around firing their singular flack cannon while great hulking beasts could lurch around the perimeter of anything good simply soaking up attention before unleashing overwhelming firepower. Aside from the interesting new ways space combat plays into the larger metagame of Marauders, the third person perspective also provides an opportunity to take in the awsome ship design. If this aesthetic of gas guzzling machinery tickles you then the big pistons and hulking hulls of the marauder ship will be an instant win.
We do know that a range of ships will be available to players in Marauders, with the option to build, loot, or even upgrade what you have depending on the outcome of expeditions into enemy territory. Upgrades are being tweaked so we’re not going to get into them fully right now but suffice to say it’s likely what you expect, meaning better performance when you’re trying to find a ship or station to board.
Having already added an entirely new dimension to survival combat, it was time for us to get some loot. After navigating a fully 3D battlefield full of rogue asteroids and potential opponents, using some fairly intuitive controls, we docked at one of several a space station docking bays. Getting from A to B in a nippy little spacecraft essentially ports the game’s core FPS controls into a 3D environment, meaning the ships even sway merrily as you strafe around space trash. After disembarking through a massive set of docking bay doors that seem to crawl open, we stretched our legs on board a mining rig.
The mining rig exhibits a unique mix of that industrial design that permeates all of our time with marauders, with the dingy arse end of an asteroid. Interiors swing wildly from carved out rock formations to control panels and featureless hallways doused in the grease of mining machinery. The hulking scale of this construction is almost as oppressive as the tight corners and limited space, making it likely to get very hectic when the number of players gets beyond double figures. While you can play solo or team up with 3 other players, several teams will be able to jump into each map, meaning that just a few teams in a contained environment will get messy. We only had a few encounters, and the odd AI opponent in this big rig. Along the way loot was mostly fetched from discarded boxes and bags littered across the shelves and floors of this station, so grabbing a rucksack early on will be a crucial addition to your shoot and loot. We also learned that there’s more than this local loot at stake during a firefight. Dropping dead will allow other players to loot each other’s ships, so if you can’t find your way back through the maze of corridors, it might just be worth camping an occupied airlock.
Getting out via one of the available escape pods or a docked ship doesn’t mean survival. Each mission still requires another run and gun escape out to a jump point somewhere on the map, and if you lose your ship, anything stowed in it is potential up for grabs too. The gorgeous, and completely pointless Dieselpunk aesthetic aside, Marauders added enough new ideas to a fairly well worn set of military survival sims that Gamespace is itching to get out into the void again and see what happens when we take on players for real. Check out more about Marauders over on the official Steam Store page now.
