Solstice Chronicles M.I.A. is a twin stick shooter that feels like playing a video arcade machine. With a fully-funded FIG campaign, the game creates a unique mix of 90s horror and uses inspiration from the classics of gaming and movies. Solstice Chronicles M.I.A offers experimentation in using different playstyles to combat the active difficulty setting called “Threat”. It’s being built on Unreal 4, and we got our hands on a demo version for the purposes of this preview.
The gameplay provides players varied mechanics, allowing every player to spec into different playstyles. One mechanic that plays into this is the accuracy decay when shooting an automatic weapon. Simply holding the trigger is realistic and adds different play styles even with the same weapon, holding it and dumping ammo inaccurately or burst fire to conserve ammo can be more accurate.
Each one of the weapons has a complete different feeling to it giving the shotgun a far different playstyle to wielding the assault rifle. If you want to focus on utilizing tactical decisions, you can either focus on pure methodical exploration or taking huge risks diving into the fray in order to gain advantage. As well as using the droid’s abilities, the scout ability adds a lot to Solstice offering ammo and other resources at easy access but at the huge cost of having higher threat.
Solstice Chronicles also plays with the concept of an active difficulty setting called threat levels and the more traditional spawn points for infected monsters. These have a lot of use in level design and could offer massive difficulty swings depending on your threat level. Dying and reviving is well balanced, punishing not playing well and rewarding survival. Making the game feels like a horror shooter rather than a survival.
The setting created from this inspiration starts in the creatures and in the environment if you take a moment to look. Being constantly under threat of death and destruction from infected creatures, the player must shift their attention to the ever-growing threats.
One of the developers explains, “While we are fans of both SC and Mass Effect, it was more our imagination and potential ideas of – what can STROL virus mutate this creature into? We created various prototypes of creatures and decided to go in one direction, idea is to connect all of the mutations somehow, so they have a chain they need to follow, it’s still work in progress.”
Solstice Chronicles itself is in early alpha as stated, and does exactly what every alpha needs to do. They have a strong platform to build what could be a great game upon. The game has a lot of breathing room to grow in alpha, its universe, mechanics and gameplay all have a good start. All the team needs to do to make this into a truly good shooter rather than a… dead end… is continue to flesh out what they have and add a nice skin to it.
