When I first found Out of Action I thought “There’s no way this won’t be excellent”. The slick and fluid combat coupled with an amazing style made it look fresh and exciting. Then I saw some gameplay after a few content creators were invited to play an early build and those thoughts remained. Yes, this is looking fantastic, and that sentiment was echoed by pretty much everyone else I saw talking about the game. The Kickstarter is now live for the game to help push it over the line as it’s currently being developed by one person.
To be honest I’m surprised that it didn’t almost immediately hit its fairly conservative goal of £50k. But it’s just over halfway with 20 or so days remaining. Maybe, all those people who loved how it looked just don’t know about the Kickstarter?
Well, I’m here to tell you to go and look at it. Because I’ve played the demo and can tell you that it’s fantastic.
Out of Action
Set within a dystopian cyberpunk world Out of Action is a PVP FPS (with offline mode) that takes inspiration from some of the best Half-Life mods. The combat is fluid, fast-paced, and visceral with a high skill ceiling. Movement is a massive part of the game and you can perform dynamic dives, slides, dodges, air dashes and rolls to keep the action flowing.
There’s also a focus on deep customisation of your ‘shells’. There are 5 different shells to choose from each with its own baseline attributes. You can then further customise your shell with perks and loadouts. Maybe you want to be a glass cannon with akimbo pistols. Or more tanky with heavy weapons and rockets. Finding out what suits you or what is more fun is all part of the process.
I can’t wait to see what kind of crazy combination people come up with to get kills. You can reflect projectiles back at enemies with a sword, launch weapons at enemies’ faces, and shoot rockets out of the air. Even place turrets on other players’ backs.
In terms of the game modes, we can expect. There will be some classics like free-for-all and team-based 5vs5. As well as some asymmetrical objective modes that will be lore driven. With objectives like hacking terminals, stealing data, destroying key locations, etc… The full extent isn’t known yet, but to be honest solid and entertaining PVP modes are often enough to keep people busy for hundreds of hours.
No In-game currency
Additionally, there will be cosmetic unlocks tied to progression and challenges – remember when video games did that? Change your colour palettes, camouflage patterns, decals, or variations of head models. All these things will be available to work towards with no in-game monetization on offer.
It may seem like a small thing, but not many games do things this way anymore and I think when someone or a team is looking to straight up give you a complete product with no in-game monetising we should be buying into that – figuratively and literally.
So fresh and so clean
Out of Action is absolutely focused on gameplay first. Making something fun, that also offers that skill gap to work towards. Far too often these days it feels like FPS games in particular focus on how to get you to spend money. I love that cosmetic items with be progression and challenge unlocks. The games makes me think of how my friends and I used to play video games. All packing our consoles and TV’s taking them to each other’s houses and having marathon LAN and online sessions. I can see this being a blast with friends (if you can have private lobbies) and just playing online with randoms.
Also, it just looks awesome. The aesthetic goes hard in this game and completely nails it. The 90’s anime/cyberpunk world with an almost cel-shaded graphical style looks amazing.
For £15 buy-in on the Kickstarter- which will get you a copy of the game, I can’t see how you won’t get your money’s worth.
But hey, don’t just take my word for it though. The (offline) demo is available to play so go and check it out for yourself. It definitely takes some getting used to, but once you get the hang of it you will start to love clicking digital heads.
-Will
