Can Hyenas loot the extraction shooter genre for all its worth?

thesixthaxis.com:

There’s a parallel dimension out there where Sega won all of the console wars – a world where the Sega Saturn’s surprise US launch panned out against the PlayStation, where the Dreamcast was able to live up to its potential, and where Sonic (not Mario or Pikachu) was the go-to everyday video game character your grandma knew. That’s the world of Hyenas, Creative Assembly’s off-beat, attitude-filled extraction shooter.

We got to go hands-on with the shooter at Gamescom ahead of this week’s Hyenas closed beta, and found myself pleasantly surprised by how tightly constructed and thought out it is. Could this be a bit of a sleeper hit for Sega?

Well, if there’s one thing that’s stood out about Hyenas since its announcement last year, for better or for worse, it’s the game’s tone. The ultra-rich nipping off to Mars after a big chunk of Earth is blown up is absolutely what would happen, but the anti-billionaire and late-stage capitalism vibes of the resistance trying to steal back largely meaningless cultural tat is a little hollow when it’s coming from a large publisher like Sega.

There’s also this wild and quite messy collage of inspirations to be seen in the character designs, from a Sonic cosplayer to a drag queen styled like a Fifth Element or Total Recall character, a Payday-esque heister in a Nixon mask – OK, so that’s a Point Break reference really – a ballerina that could almost be a Harley Quinn concept art, and on and on.

It’s all a bit of a muddle and I don’t know who it will speak to, but even from the one relatively brief game that I got to play at Gamescom, it’s clear that Creative Assembly knows how to make a pretty good extraction shooter.

As with the rest of this FPS sub-genre, the idea is to drop into a map,