Beyond Mankind: The Awakening – -apkrig
The action first-person sci-fi RPG survival Beyond Mankind: The Awakening by Brytenwald (originally the creators of the eponymous mode for Mount & Blade: Warband) is set to be released in about two weeks, on August 31st.
Usually we tend to report similarly early data as good news, but in this case it is unfortunately different. If the game were to be released in three quarters of a year, for example, one could at least hope that the two-hour demo that I could play does not represent the final quality of the title.
The game will take you to the twenty-second century. The earth is waking up from the nuclear winter, which the people themselves have caused by a reckless war. Two factions are vying for prominence: the United Nations, a population of lunar and Martian colonies who avoided the ancient atomic hell, and the HOPE initiative, which acts as a technological sect barricaded in an underground base where it grows genetically bred super soldiers. And in the end, the mutated original inhabitants of the planet will certainly not be left behind.
With the same elegance with which the plot carried you a hundred years ahead, the game itself will send you fifteen years into the past. I usually have no problem missing an imperfect audiovisual, especially when it comes to a game from a smaller studio, but … Ladies and gentlemen, this is power.
As you can enjoy in the scattered pictures, Beyond Mankind looks roughly like Half-Life 2, a game from 2004. And I may have just offended Half-Life 2. Disgusting textures, just look, bare, ugly locations planted with repulsive models, the polygons of which could be counted on the hands of an experienced lumberjack. And when you look at characters or enemy monsters, you don’t know whether to laugh or cry bitterly. In addition, even in the short two hours, a number of bugs and glitches were able to play on my screen, which also does not bode well for the demo of the game, which is practically around the corner.
Of course, we can curse a thousand times that the graphics don’t matter and it’s primarily about how the title is played. But Beyond Mankind is such a terribly ugly thing that it just inadvertently draws attention to itself. And even if you get used to it in the end, unfortunately, it doesn’t even seem that the game could rely on at least the gameplay.
The background drives appear to be quite standard. The character has a few statistics that affect the success of dialogue choices, number of lives, regeneration of endurance, damage, load capacity and so on. Obviously there will be crafting, but there was no opportunity for it in the demo. It’s also not clear how much it will depend on survival systems – the hero is hungry and thirsty, but with the short game time of the trial version, there was no time for it to cause any problems.
What is unfortunately clear is that even the fight will not have a chance to save Beyond Mankind in a fundamental way. Shooting doesn’t work … actually at all. Weapons are practically without recoil, they sound strange and the opponents emotionally completely ignore the interventions. You just hold the button and you can tell that you are shooting with a little exaggeration only from the decreasing ammunition counter. The enemy stands like a pillar, then falls. As a result, the excitement of the action is roughly comparable to a visit to the spa.
I’ll be abrupt, but it looks like if Beyond Mankind is to have a chance to get interested, it will have to be a story. And I honestly don’t dare to guess if it will be worth it or not, even if you catch me by the throat.
On the one hand, it seems that the creators had a number of interesting ideas about the setting, and the suggested games with implanted memories could be extracted a lot if handled correctly, but on the other hand, a few roughly constructed interviews and scrubbing places could be registered in the demo.
For example, a situation where the commander gives you an urgent mission, the request for a more detailed explanation will go away with the readiness, that there is absolutely no time to get ready … And then he will add that you stop for a few minutes at a sacred place of pilgrimage it is such a tradition here. So change your mind, dear commander – either the mission is urgent or I should bounce to meditate, but not both at once!
Yes, it would not be fair to make final verdicts on an unreleased game after a two-hour test. But, hand on heart, I would be a little embarrassed by the demo, even if it was a very early alpha, let alone a sample of the finished product. Unfortunately, the impression of playing is clear: In this case, be more careful and do not rush into buying Beyond Mankid. At least not right after it comes out.
