Today we’re looking at another five-versus-five multiplayer game mode in V1 Interactive’s upcoming sci-fi strategic shooter as part of our ongoing month-long IGN First coverage.
The Retrieval multiplayer mode is a little reminiscent of Halo’s classic Assault game type, where one team starts on offense and must collect a core from one of two locations midway on the map, and deliver it to the designated payload location on the enemy’s side of the base. The defensive team just has to stop them by setting up a perimeter around the core locations or the delivery point itself. You can see the mode in action, from both sides of the bomb, in the video above.
Fair warning: the footage above was captured from an early build of multiplayer so these assets aren’t final and you may spot a slight hiccup that hadn’t been ironed at the time of recording. Game development is a process.
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Retrieval is the second multiplayer game type that will be playable in the upcoming Disintegration multiplayer beta, along with the classic three-point capture-and-hold Control game mode. Like Control mode (which requires your ground crew to actually capture the points), in Retrieval your ground crew units are the only ones capable of collecting a core and walking it to the drop-off point, which means you need to keep them alive in order to score.
This sets up a lot of really interesting opportunities for both offense and defensive play, where defensive players don’t necessarily need to kill the opposing team’s players since destroying their ground crew units effectively leaves them unable to move the core. However, killing a player disables their ground units until they respawn, so deciding what to focus on becomes important as they close the distance to the drop off point.
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The threat of speedy crews like the Neon Dreams – which zip around the map on low-armor light gravcycles with burly ground units to carry the core – can be neutralized quickly by focusing down the player’s gravecycle. The tankier crews like Warhedz or King’s Guard are slow and tough, which means firing everything at their ground units is usually the fastest way to ensure they can’t move the core.
After playing both modes, I found Retrieval to be a little more strategic of the two modes with a lot of opportunities to set up choke points while on defense or to distract the defenders with one core while grabbing and running the other from a different side of the map on offense. This means longer engagements where teamwork and sustainability are key, so selecting a crew with a healing secondary ability – like Tech Noir’s friendly-seeking repair dart or the deployable nano emitter healing bubble on King’s Guard – makes a huge difference when all ten players are clashing over a core in a massive battle.
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In the gameplay above we started the match as the lumbering Warhedz, a heavy chassis crew that lobs bursts of bouncing explosives (which are great for cleaning up ground units) or can fire a slow-recharging, massive warhead that sticks to whatever it hits for devastating area-of-effect damage that’s a guaranteed killed if it hits an enemy player. But based on the way the match was going, we switched it up to the long-range sniping Tech Noir to soften up targets from a distance and heal our team members. Since you can change crews on the fly in a match, it can be really important to swap crews as the match evolves in order to counter the other team.
We’ll be diving into each of Disintegration’s playable crews later this month in order to show off their strengths and weaknesses to get you ready for the Disintegration multiplayer beta – which you can sign up for right now.
In the meantime, be sure to check out full Disintegration hands-on preview impressions and watch some campaign story gameplay from early and mid-level missions.
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Brandin Tyrrel is a Senior Editor at IGN. You can find him on Unlocked, or chat over on Twitter at @BrandinTyrrel.
Source: IGN.com Disintegration: 16 Minutes of Retrieval Multiplayer Gameplay