Hyenas developers discuss Sega's claim it's been a "challenging title"
What's happening with Hyenas? Announced a year ago but still without a release date, Creative Assembly's team-based sci-fi extraction shooter was playable publicly this week for the first time at Gamescom in Cologne, following a somewhat eye-opening summation of its status last week from Sega top brass.
I played a brief match of Hyenas on the Gamescom showfloor and found it a bright and breezy shooter with fun PVPVE moments and some promising zero-G sections. But my time with it was too brief to really leave with much of a lasting impression.
It's good news, then, that Hyenas will soon be available to play more widely, via a Steam beta test you can sign up for now, with access going live on 31st August. It's from that, I think, that people will finally be able to decide for themselves what is working and what is not — and this is Creative Assembly told me it is waiting for as well.
«It's the scary but also the good part to say, 'I think I can predict the issues players will raise, but I'm probably wrong. And also in what order do they want them [changed]?» associate game director Christoph Will told me.
Right now, players can pick from a roster of heroes to launch a three-person team into a spacestation on a mission to swipe valuable loot, eliminate waves of AI enemies, and extract themselves successfully — all while two other teams of three attempt to do the same.
I can see the potential of the gameplay loop — it's competitive Payday in space — and the fact you're collecting a growing vault of pop culture items including licensed music is a fun idea. Will tells me that feedback from players here in Cologne has been positive — and yet there are still questions from the upcoming beta that need to be answered,
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