The Dark Herald’s Game of the Year
I step out of the ruins of a record shop and onto the streets of Selaco. My health is 100% and I have plenty of ammo. Like a perfect nugget I’m admiring the scenery instead of checking the corner I’m about to step around.
My reward for this stupidity was a flash and a boom heralding the loss of half my health. I chuck an ice grenade at the pair of SOBs while I slide out of their line of fire and behind a dumpster. I lose a little more of my precious health getting to cover. But then there is a thump and shattering glass sound announcing my ice grenade’s detonation. I run out from behind the dumpster and apply a liberal dose of Boomstick to my two new patients curing them of their bad attitude as well as everything else.
My happy fun time attitude is short-lived when I hear a garbled voice coming from the shop I stepped out of a couple of paragraphs ago ordering me to “STAND DOWN!” Shit, my patients had friends in the waiting room. I innoculate by dropping a landmine in front of the shop I just left and run past the remains of the guards, reloading my shotgun as I hoof it. This thing loads slow and racks slow, but leaves a gratifying mess when used. I’m heading back to a diner I was at a minute ago, lots of health there that I didn’t need then but do now. I’m at 44% health and that’s a little low if I’m in a fight.
I run into the diner and… S-H-I-T! Four goons are waiting for me. I split the melon on the nearest one with the shotgun but its cycle is way too low for this many goons. I slide in while switching to my twin uzis and spray out a double mag dump. All four are now down and the diner is covered in purple (sure, why not?) blood. I’m down to 14% health but there is plenty of health here. I step out of the diner feeling peppy at 100% and into a grenade. Down to 35% health as I chuck a grenade back at the asshole who just clipped me. I grab my assault rifle and make my hurt feelings known.
I didn’t lose any more health but I’ve burned up a lot of ammo. Then I sigh in despair when I hear the thud and a deep, electronically distorted voice. A freaking Juggernaut! I’m low on health and ammo and I’m going into a boss fight.
This game is hard.
Good!
Do you have any idea how much it PAINS me to agree with Kotaku about anything? Granted they named it best Retro-FPS but so far as I’m concerned it’s my favorite game of the year.
It’s Selaco.
It is unbelievable what Altered Orbit Studios has created with so little. I have no idea how many devs are at this studio or even if they are getting paid. This game is the kind of labor of love that goes way beyond a mere tribute band to classic FPS games of the 1990s. Although, Altered Orbit claims that Selaco is a tribute to both Doom and F.E.A.R. (so the mid-2000s are included too). They are right by the way it does feel like a blend of both games.
I had figured it was another game built on Unity and tweaked to look low-poly. Then I read the minimum system requirements: Intel i3-2100. This game can run on a dual-core processor. I checked the next time it booted up. This miracle of a Boomer Shooter is built on freaking GZ-Doom. Running, sliding, jumping, glass that blows in the right direction during an explosion, true 3d movement, props that explode into confetti and it runs the smartest enemy NPCs since F.E.A.R. This engine has been hacked into another universe. It taps into a parallel dimension where the Idtech One engine was never abandoned and is now the dominant form of AI life.
The detail work is what makes this game so extraordinary. Just do a little prodding around and the world of Selaco comes vibrantly to life. You learn about a tragedy that befell Earth kind of peripherally. Imagine you arrived in 2024 straight from 1984 and you keep hearing about remember Nine-Eleven. At first, you think it’s some kind of emergency phone number campaign but it becomes obvious (without looking into it) that it means something more sinister. You work out that Seleaco is a colony world that is likely the home of the last fragment of humanity and now it’s under attack.
It’s not exactly an immersive sim, there is too little immersion and too much fighting for that but this world is amazingly lived in.
You can interact with just about everything. There is a frightened little Roomba, you comfort it and it loves you for it. There is a foul-mouthed Teddy bear that when fired out of the grenade launcher, homes in on its target spouting profane one-liners. You can pick up most anything in the game and more importantly blast it into John Woo-style confetti. Which is critically important if your game is a call out to F.E.A.R. You can open and shut windows, turn lights on and off, and flush toilet paper rolls down the toilet, (flush too many and the shitter explodes).
The sound designer is a by-Glob genius. The music has that bright 90s synth anime vibe to it, like AD Police Files. The gun blasts and bomb explosions are intensely gratifying, it has the Build engine energy to it that you’d get from Duke 3D and Shadow Warrior.
Given the ultra-low budget, there weren’t going to be a lot of voice actors, there were only five involved so there was a lot of electronic sleight of hand used to make them sound different. And that’s okay because, in a Boomer Shooter, you expect the sound designer to bit-crush the hell out all the voices.
The NPCs appear to be using Goal Oriented Action Planning.* I’m only guessing but I’m definitely getting that F.E.A.R. vibe of how they work well against you as a team but tend to default into hit-scanning when it’s one-on-one. In the current iteration, your first boss fight turns out to be laughably easy because you can just stand at the top of the stairs and the Juggernaut runs straight into a nook that it can’t get out of and can’t get a line of fire on you, you just dump all of your shotgun into it until it dies.
And the level design like everything else about this game is superb. Once combat begins you’ll be locked in until you win or die. There will be no place at all that you can just squat and wait for them to come to you because you will always be vulnerable to a flanking attack. You must keep moving if you are going to live. If you need a break you can duck into a Safe Room. The Safe Room is where you upgrade your weapons and can travel back and forth between levels you’ve already been to. A must for Completionist obsessives.
If you are going to make this older school of enemy “AI” work then level design is critical because it keeps both the NPC and the player herded in the proper direction.
Exploration is a big part of this game and again, Selaco plays fair. Unlike say Boltgun where you just have to keep wall-humping to find your way out of identically looking rooms, Selaco will draw you into the places where you need to go in order to progress. Important doorways are haloed in green light.
The weapons (aside from the homicidal homing Teddy Bear) are the same weapons you had in FEAR with the Uzis providing the two-gun mojo instead of the pistols. I suspect that is a necessity because the pistol (the Roaring Cricket) is OP AF. The shotgun is almost Doom 2 OP but it keeps from being a game breaker because of the slow reload, slow cocking, and the fact that blasting an enemy into fine purple mist effectively blinds you. The sniper rifle is almost useless, not because it’s bad, but because it’s only useful for killing other snipers and there just aren’t that many. The Plasma Rifle is a plasma rifle you kind of get the feeling it’s there because it has to be. The Penetrator is blatantly ripped from FEAR and will nail enemy sprites to the wall if they are close enough. There isn’t a rocket launcher but the grenade launcher will perform the same function if upgraded for it.
Which brings us to the upgrades. During the game, you collect Scrap from various locations and use that in the Safe Room to buy upgrades. Some of them are clever. For instance, if you find a cracked wall you can use the shotgun to break through it if you have the right upgrade instead of wasting a grenade or hunting down some prop that explodes.
Do I have any complaints? A couple. First, the mini-suicide bots are an anti-fun pain in the ass. All they do is burn up ammo that Selaco is never too generous with in the first place. Second, the final level kind of blue balls you. The game is upfront about being an early release, the screen says it’s ver. 0.99. The last level is the only place that it shows. You finally get the railgun and yeah it’s broken but you barely get to use it. In the final scene of the game, a giant mech crashes through the ceiling, then the game freezes and fades to an outro card. The reason you tend to forget that it is an early release is because it has 30 freaking levels.
Given just how polished it is, I strongly suspect that they only sent Selaco out to a grateful world is that they ran out of money. But let me make this plain, this does not feel like an unfinished game, this is absolutely not another Blood 2 or Redneck Rampage. There’s just more to come and the studio is promising to provide the DLC as a free upgrade. I’m sure they mean to, but small studios frequently run into problems they can’t overcome. If you think this is an unacceptable risk, then you suck bad and I don’t want to know you.
In this year of the AAA Meltdown, Selaco outperforms all of the $70 games and for about a third of the price.
Go buy it.
*I might be wrong on this because if an enemy NPC is the sole remaining (temporary) survivor, it might give a panicked cry of “THEY’RE DEAD! THEY’RE ALL DEAD!”
