Marauders: Closed Alpha Hands-On Impressions
In its first closed alpha test, Marauders takes the “extract and survive” concept from games like The Cycle and tweaks it into a formula that has the potential to replace your favorite survival shooter. Its moment-to-moment gunplay is straightforward and satisfying, serving as the base for which all of its other more eccentric systems flourish. Some things, like its ship-to-ship combat, could use some calibration, but as a whole, the life of space piracy is promising one.
Your goal in any given round of Marauders is to pull off a successful pirate raid in one of a handful of areas. I came across two in my time with the alpha so far” the abandoned space station and the derelict iridium mine. I appreciated how different each location looked, but without a minimap they both can feel equally labyrinthine. It takes a good amount of reps to learn to get to the various different landmarks within each map, and wandering around lost in claustrophobic caves and tiny catwalks is a quick way to get dead.
A raid happens in three parts. Part one is after you gear up and take to your ship, either solo or with a crew. When you load into a game, you’ll need to fly it across an expanse of space to get to the raid location. You’re not alone in this trek, though. Other ships with other crews are flying around as well. If you’re lucky, it’ll be a simple sprint to the raid location. I wasn’t very lucky most of the time, as I was constantly outrunning enemy fire, and on occasion returning it against other marauder crews. Maybe it's because we all have the same sad dinghy of a spacecraft, with the same mediocre weaponry and maneuverability, but these dogfights often turned into unimpressive stalemates where we’d strafe and shoot until the other
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