Scars Above

Scars Above is an upcoming third-person sci-fi shooter from developer Mad Head Games and publisher Prime Matter. It is a competent, at-times-difficult game with a mostly-interesting-yet-still-sort-of-throwaway story — at least, that’s how I feel about the portion of the game I was able to play for this preview.

You play as Dr. Kate Ward, a scientist and member of the Sentient Contact Assessment and Response team (hey, that acronym is in the game’s title!) You’re on a mission to examine a huge floating diamond that has appeared above Earth. Kate is pretty generic (and so is the name Kate), but at least they don’t have too much inane dialogue, cringey quips, or annoying player tips get in the way of an otherwise mostly enjoyable time.

During this mission, something (surprisingly) goes wrong and you’re teleported to an alien planet full of monsters, where you wake up alone. The levels contain semi-branching paths that might contain ammo or floating little diamond things that build up your skill points until you have a full one, which you can then use to unlock skills. These skills are mostly what you’d expect from your basic skill-unlock system. Then again, to be honest, I didn’t spend much time interacting with this part of the game, since I was mostly just here to get a general impression rather than really sink my teeth into the game’s systems (which I might do when the full game drops).

Scars Above

But even though I was digging what was on offer here, I couldn’t shake this overwhelming feeling that it pretty much just feels like a budget version of Returnal. This isn’t a bad thing. Returnal is a great game, and great games often influence other games down the line. I mean, just look at the number of indie developers that assume that, just by throwing a hang-glider into their game and softening the color palette, they could have the next Breath of the Wild on their hands.

Although Scars Above lacks the roguelike elements of Returnal, it does feature over-the-shoulder third-person combat, a hostile alien world to explore, some rather punishing sub-boss and boss encounters, and a semi-branching maze-like level design — all of this gives me Returnal vibes.

Again, this isn’t a bad thing, but it does open Scars up to comparison. And in this case, the comparison is mostly only skin deep, because Scars Above lacks the real meat of something like Returnal. There are a number of issues that held Scars back from sticking the landing, and more importantly, from immersing the player in the game’s environment. Mot of this stems from clumsy animations and minor oversights.

The grunt enemy animations leave much to be desired. There are these little buggers that pop out of the ground to nip at your heels, which just look like leftover assets from that Defiance MMO (who else remembers that?) These enemies feel very static, almost like they were designed in a long-gone era.

Even Dr. Ward herself suffers from insufficient animations. When jumping from a ledge of really any height, for example, her body locks up and she just lands stiff and still; standing straight up, instead of bracing for the impact or at the very least bending her knees. That’s not a big deal in the grand scheme of things, but it looks clumsy and it’s never not noticeable.

Scars Above

The biggest distraction for me, though, is Dr. Ward’s cold, dead facial expression. It’s as if she’s an android that’s been powered off. Even when she’s in the heat of battle, or when she’s struggling to clamber up a ledge, she just stares off into the unknown with those dead eyes. Again, this is a minor issue, but I think you can kind of see now how these minor issues compile into an overall sense that something’s just off here.

For the most part, though — minor issues aside — the combat is at least enjoyable enough. Enemy hits can feel cheap rather than truly challenging at times, but it’s not enough to induce rage-quitting or torrents of profanity. I will say that having the right trigger for both your melee and — while using the left trigger to aim — shooting your blaster never really felt like a good idea. Maybe that’s just because I’m used to having melee on any other input. Perhaps over time it wouldn’t even bother me. But in my short time with the game, it was oddly distracting. I admit that I didn’t check to see if I could remap it, which in hindsight does seem like an oversight on my part.

That said, your blaster certainly blasts, and it feels fine and responsive enough. You have to continuously cycle through the elemental ammo types using a menu wheel (brought up by holding the right bumper), as various blocked passages or locked doors require different elements to interact with them. Enemies also have weak points that require you to keep swapping between the basic elemental variants. I do like how water enemies, if shot using an electricity bullet, will conduct arcs of electricity that hit other enemies, and they don’t take as much damage if shot with a flame bullet. As we all know, water extinguishes flames but is a conductor for electricity.

Scars Above

You also replenish your ammo from items found around the map: flowers or crystal deposits, things of the like. So you have to always be on the lookout for any ammo types that you might need (although they are practically everywhere) instead of just using the default ammo type to power through. This isn’t anything new, but it’s handled really well, and I took a liking to this mechanic.

Thankfully, framerate was never much of an issue for me — despite the beefy suggested RAM requirements, my decent laptop handled it with aplomb. I wasn’t, however, able to unlock the beta branch on my Steam Deck, so I couldn’t test Scars Above on the Deck natively. I did, however, stream it from my laptop to the Deck for a little bit. Since Scars Above has default controller support, I was able to control it just fine on the Deck. I expect that, although it’s too early for there to be a Deck-verified rating, this game should run just fine on the Steam Deck, with maybe a minor amount of graphics tweaks — if any.

Overall, what I played of Scars Above is in fine-to-good shape. I don’t think this one is a must-play for me, especially when there are more polished titles out there (namely Returnal), but it is a good bit of fun. And the issues I had could also be easily patched or fixed in future updates.

If Scars Above is already on your list of anticipated titles, I’m sure you will have a good time with it. It is, if nothing else, pretty much exactly what is being advertised in the trailers. But if you just gotta have a solid deal of polish in the games you play, and perhaps prefer a more skill-based approach to difficult combat scenarios, well, there is at least one alternative that seems to keep coming to mind.

Dislaimer: I was provided with a preview build of Scars Above on Steam, but the opinions expressed in this article are my own.

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