Scars Above Review

Mad Head Games sci-fi third-person shooter, Scars Above, is a shooter heavily influenced from yesterday, explosive action with hints of Dark Souls-inspired game design. Overall it offers a nice package of problem solving, riddles, and loads of enemies to send packing.

You take the role SCAR team member Kate Ward, following her accident on an extra-terrestrial world. It seems that some unknown period of time has elapsed. While Kate recalls the tragic crash as recent, what she is learning contradicts her memory. In order to survive the planet’s hostile wildlife and a perilous invading species, as well as to solve the mystery of what happened to her crew and the planet itself, Kate must blast her way through the game’s narrative.

Scars Above has a basic gameplay idea that takes the Soulslike formula of dodging cautiously around a foe and moves it into a sci-fi scenario where your character is carrying large scientifically produced firearms, manages to merge exploration and fighting in exactly the perfect ratios to keep both fascinating.

The game borrows ideas from Soulslikes in other ways as well. When you die, monoliths act as checkpoints and provide you the opportunity to resurrect all of the local enemies in exchange for a chance to replenish your health and ammunition. Either you battle to advance or you go back and try to fight your way through the encounters once more.

Gameplay is made more engaging by this type of risk and return because you can always go back and replenish your resources at the cost of starting each battle over from scratch. This motivated me to work harder, but it also meant that I had to replay some encounters so frequently that I knew how to progress using less ammunition and keeping the most health possible.

Gameplay is kept fresh by the variety of weaponry you have access to. Your primary weapon is a lightning blasting pistol named VERA, but you also obtain amusing toys like a cryogun that unleashes a shotgun-like blast of ice at foes or a fire cannon that needs to charge up before it can fire. Each of these weapons will have a different effect on the foe: a wet foe will freeze more quickly, while dousing foes in flammable liquid and setting them on fire will have predictable but no less stunning effects.

There’s so much going on in Scars Above, that your never given much time for thought, or complete relaxation, as you never know what’s lurking behind scenery. You’ll find yourself really having to concentrate, and maybe pulling the odd facial expression, as you get to work clearing the way forward to progress to the next Monolith and the next checkpoint.

I found the shooting to be quite accurate, yet frantic at times in Scars Above, giving you that real satisfaction when progressing. Even when you felt massively overwhelmed at times, you always felt that you were learning. One of the tricky points with Scars above is the movement from the alien creatures themselves, they never seem to stay in one place, appearing from the depths of water, elevating that pulse rate, creating that wonderful atmosphere, getting the adrenaline flowing, and then bang it’s back to the respawn point.

So hopefully I’m painting the picture for a souls-like game, but there’s so much more to Scars Above to put it solely in that bracket.

Although you’ll spend much of your time exploring a desolate marshland after a barren swamp full of meat, the world is alive and exciting. At one point, the game even gives you access to a mountainside, which presents a challenge to avoid freezing to death in the harsher climates.

In spite of the dire situations, you find yourself in, it’s a more upbeat universe than the Souls-inspired titles it takes its cue from. After a tough boss battle, you unwind next to some aliens who resemble cattle for a little while before returning to the fight with some more tranquil animals.

With Scars Above and playing the role of Kate and her pursuit for science, it’s Science that actually plays an important role in the levelling up system. Instead of levelling up by defeating enemies, you acquire knowledge cubes concealed throughout levels and gain information by scanning unfamiliar plants and creatures. This prevents you from levelling by force and destruction, and instead it’s intellect and real world learning, which is a little different. Although upgrades are all too common in shooters, Kate levels with the twin trees of engineering and xenobiology, and it’s rather cool.

Within the world of Scars Above, there is a sense that something has corrupted the local fauna to make them so nasty, although the majority of your ammunition is obtained from plants or eggs around the world. You are yet another pollutant, but somehow you seem to be required for the larger good.

Towards the halfway point of the game, you go back to your crashed ship, the Hermes, and it feels like the horror film’s climax has just ended when you get there. Along with the scariest aspect of horror in the game, there are mutated bodies lying around and an uneaten lunch of what appears to be chicken katsu and mashed potatoes.

I don’t want to go to much further in describing things from this point, for fear of spoilers etc, but what I can tell you, is that you get access to more weapons, which have different environmental effects.

Overall, I think Scars Above is a decent third person shooter with souls-like gameplay. The Sci-fi setting is perfect for an adventure, and shooting countless aliens can only be a good thing. If you struggle at times with the enemies, you never lose the sense that you’re progressing and learning, ready for your next encounter.

Whilst the game doesn’t exactly do anything new for the genre, it doesn’t really put a foot wrong too. The world is full of atmosphere, the aliens and the frantic action get’s the pulse racing, the puzzles are not to challenging.

My biggest criticisms of the game are nit-pickings at best, the lack of handholding, can lead to you get lost, and treading the same ground, meaning you encounter the same fights and occasionally boss battles again, and if I’m being totally honest the game feels low budget from a graphical point of you, but I feel we have a cult classic on our hands with Scars Above. It’s differently worth a play if third person, action adventures are your thing.