The top-down sci-fi shooter is one of the free Xbox Live Games With Gold until October 15.
Livelock (PG)
Xbox One (version tested) / PlayStation 4 / PC
Copy purchased (Xbox Live Games With Gold)
As far as I can tell this is the only game released by Quebec-based Tuque Games (not pronounced “2K Games”, as much as that amuses me). Livelock isn’t entirely to my tastes, but that may be because I was expecting something different; it looks like a Robotron or Smash TV-style twin-stick shooter from screenshots but has a slower, more deliberate pace to it.
In the world of Livelock, machines dominate the world; humans are basically non-existent, save for those who transplanted their consciousness into a machine beforehand. Some of the machines subscribe to the time-honoured trope of ‘humanity being imperfect, machines are perfect and will inherit the Earth’. As one of a group of up to three cyborg-type things you subscribe to the trope of ‘maybe all those machines should get blown up’, and trudge into the fray at the order of your totally-upstanding-and-not-about-to-turn-on-everyone mission control.
The gameplay is basically that of a top-down shooter. You start at point A, advance to point B, blow up everything along the way, and blow up whatever is waiting for you at the end. There are a total of about 22 missions divided into three acts, although the opening act takes up about half the length of the campaign; overall you can go from start to finish in about 5 hours, probably less if you are working as a team.
Other reviews compared it to a dungeon-crawler like Diablo III rather than to an arcade-style experience, and there are RPG elements. At the start of the game you choose from one of three ‘chassis’, which are basically character classes (a heavy, a marksman and a support class). In each level, you gain additional abilities as you go by blowing stuff up for experience points and collecting ‘Carbon’ (the currency for buying weapon upgrades). Most of the pickups you collect during play, however, are score bonuses for the game’s score-attack mechanic; occasionally you’ll get ammunition for your secondary and power weapons, but for the most part, collectables are there to multiply your score.
The game tries to add some variety to the mission structure by having additional goals such as ‘escort the thing to the goal’ and ‘defend your position from waves of enemies’, but these tend to be more annoying than fun. Escort missions in video games have never been fantastic additions- normally the thing you’re escorting is either ‘slow and extremely vulnerable’ or ‘makes foolish, risky decisions’, and Livelock‘s escort missions are of the former variety. It doesn’t help that you are assailed on all sides by enemies during these sequences, making them quite difficult for single players to negotiate; these stretches of the game are quite obviously intended for co-operative play.
The weapons also don’t feel like they have a lot of heft. I played as a marksman, which starts with a burst rifle and a melee attack, but the rifle does very little damage (even early enemies can take up to a clip to finish off) and you seem to swing and miss more often than connecting with the melee. Even early in the game you’ll find yourself surrounded by dozens of bullet-sponge enemies, and while you have regenerating health if you can get out of the firing line long enough, that is a challenge in itself. Later upgrades do more damage and allow you to call in air strikes and use homing missiles, but the early part of the game can be a slog until these are unlocked.
To compensate for your weedy arsenal, Livelock gives you infinite respawns (“reprints”) on the lower difficulty levels. This has the effect of basically making the game a cakewalk, as you can just continue to throw endless robot soldiers at the enemy until the battle is won. Presumably this means your score will take a hit if you’re aiming for the game’s leaderboards (there is a time bonus for beating each level under the par time) but if you’re just trying to beat the campaign the feature removes the game’s challenge.
Livelock‘s real value, then, lies in its multiplayer mode; teaming up with a group of three to assault the leaderboards is where the game reaches its balance of ‘having enough challenge’ and ‘having enough firepower’. You’ll also need to play through the campaign a few times if you want to unlock all the achievements (there are class-specific tasks that require you to go through the game using each character class), so if you have a group to play with there is definitely some replayability. You can also just start a public session and have random players drop in and out to assist you, although once the Xbox Live free month disappears I’m not sure if the player base will stay.
Graphically the game starts off drab but adds a lot of colour in later missions, with snowy mountains and volcanic areas adding variety to the aesthetics. The player character designs look like rejected ideas from the new batch of Transformers movies, but enemy designs have some neat touches; the enemies in the Moscow area, for example, all bear resemblance to communist-era statues. Your camera angle does obscure things at times and you have no control over the view, so you occasionally find yourself hiding behind a roof or other debris. The distortion effect when you have low health, which splits the screen into red/green/blue images, is also more annoying than helpful as it makes it more difficult to avoid enemy fire.
Given only 5% of players (based on the Xbox Achievements) finish the campaign, you may well decide it isn’t quite worth pushing through the game; this is especially true in single-player, where I can’t see myself returning to replay the game with the other classes. For all of these faults, though, the game is perfectly competent, fairly liberal in giving out Achievements (I picked up 440 Gamerscore in about 5 hours) and might well find an audience for free.
On other platforms- or after October 15, when the Games With Gold offer ends- Livelock is AUD$14 (USD$10).
