Stray Bombay, a video game development studio headed up by Left 4 Dead development team veteran Chet Faliszek, have crafted The Anacrusis.
The Anacrusis is an upcoming four player survival shooter game that’s currently in Early Access on Steam. It’s also available to Xbox Game Pass users (on both console and PC) via Game Preview.
The story of The Anacrusis is set aboard a massive starship stranded at the edge of explored space and the game features some funky late 60’s, early 70’s style aesthetics. Players will team up with friends, other players or bots and fight against alien hordes in this four-player, cooperative first-person shooter.
Playing the Early Access build, The Anacrusis certainly has that Left 4 Dead vibe to it with waves and waves of enemies coming at you while you progress through a level.
This is however, nothing new to the gaming world and is rather formulaic these days. In fact, there’s been a few games now which follow this exact same pattern such as Strange Brigade, Aliens: Fireteam Elite, World War Z and most recently Back 4 Blood.
So you might be asking yourself how does The Anacrusis set itself apart?
Unfortunately since it’s still in Early Access, the major differences that we noticed were limited to the game’s “A.I Director” and the ability to unlock perks via a “Matter Compiler” (which can be found within levels).
The A.I Director dynamically adjusts the difficulty to adapt to your play style. Breezing through a level and massacring aliens with no problems? Suddenly you’ll start facing tougher opponents as the game’s director adjusts spawn rates and more.
Speaking of opponents, The Anacrusis has some weirdly named special enemies to fight.
There’s a “Gooper” which can trap you in what seems to be snot, a “Flasher” which is effectively a walking Sun which blinds you, a “Spawner” which yup, you guessed it, spawns enemies, a “Brute” (self-explanatory) and a “Grabber” which right now, seems broken since it can capture you from extremely far away.
Again though, special enemies like these are standard fare in a title that uses the same Left 4 Dead formula as its base. Hopefully more is done to make these stand out because right now they just seemed rather generic to be quite honest.
The Anacrusis is quite clearly an Early Access title but the visuals are great and there’s definitely a decent framework in place. The execution, however, is severely lacking right now with weapons feeling incredibly weak/lacklustre, the movement speed of your playable character being too slow and enemies being quite buggy and glitchy.
Playing through the entire first chapter cooperatively wasn’t exactly terrible but the game felt rather barebones. There also wasn’t any sort of tutorial and no real guidance was given so be warned, you’re on your own here and it’s quite easy to get lost in a level. Especially if your party members end up wandering into side rooms and get separated from you.
The Anacrusis will need a lot more than its groovy aesthetics if it’s to succeed against its rivals. We’re hoping that Stray Bombay will be taking player feedback into consideration while they continue to work on this title.
The game is available via Xbox Game Pass, so if you’re interested in checking it out, we suggest doing so over there before fully committing to purchasing it on Steam or Xbox.
