Ripout Preview: Doom 3-Style FPS Horror...With Friends
It’s very apparent at first sight that Ripout is absolutely in love with 80’s horror. Its retrofuture interiors and lumpy body horror should fire plenty of nostalgia neurons for fans of The Thing or Alien. But as its aesthetics are clearly in the past, the gameplay makes a valiant attempt at moving the co-op shooter into a newer, less crowded direction. Ripout chooses patient and deliberate room-sweeping over colorful and frantic bullet storms against waves of bad guys – a sort of Doom 3-esque experience, but with friends. And though I only had a small window of time to stalk its corridors, Ripout has the makings of a premier horror space shooter without notable contemporaries.
In Ripout, humanity made a bioweapon to fend off an alien invasion which backfired, creating a dangerous race of mutants that sent the human race barreling towards extinction. In the year 2084, Team Human is down bad and needs to do desperate and dangerous things to get a leg up on the enemy. Within the limits of the demo I took with the team at Pet Project Games, that meant flying out into a derelict freighter, shooting our way though fleshy bad guys to complete objectives, and getting out safely.
As an elite special forces-like operative, you never leave headquarters without your trusty pet gun, a byproduct of all this bioweapon experimentation. It's a conventional shotgun, long gun, or assault weapon, with a little critter under slung. That little beast is most useful for hunting other small creatures that populate the field. After you sic your pet on them, they drag them back to you, giving you a new temporary ability like a sturdy shield or a powerful melee claw. It’s difficult to intentionally swipe power ups to min-max your loadout since
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