Is it fun? Spectre Divide first impressions (August playtest)

Spectre Divide is a fresh first-person shooter that aims to supply an innovative new experience to the round-based co-op shooter arena. Proudly backed by Shroud, the former professional gamer and Youtuber, this game aims to flip the genre on its head.

So here are my first impressions on the closed beta of Spectre Divide, keeping in mind that this is not yet the final product.

General first impressions of Spectre Divide

In a nutshell, Spectre Divide is Counter Strike, but with an extra life per round. Unless, of course, your extra life gets taken out while you’re not looking. Yes, that’s a thing that can happen. So if you can picture all of that, you have a good idea of what Spectre Divide is.

You play as either attackers or defenders, and the attackers have to go plant a bomb (or Zeus), which the defenders must either prevent from happening, or defuse the planted bomb (or Zeus). Sounds familiar, right? Of course, this is only a development build, and more game modes are sure to follow.

Even so, there are some innovative ideas at play here.

The Core Mechanics

In Spectre Divide, you have the option to control and throw a “Puck” which plants your Spectre (the other version of you, or your second life) wherever it lands. So if you want to find the tallest building you can and camp up there, you can do that.

Want to pass through bars in a jiffy? Throw your Puck through and pop out on the other side. Just make sure you leave your idle body somewhere safe.

You also get to choose from a variety of “sponsors” – or classes. This impacts the items you can buy and use in game, with things like self-heals, team-heals, grenades, traps, etc. This adds a healthy layer of variety to the game, and experimenting with the different classes is certainly fun.

Finally, there’s an auto-crew system which I thought was pretty cool. You get auto-recruited into a crew once you reach a certain level, after which you can earn points for your crew by playing matches. There’s a crew leaderboard, making for some fun friendly competition.

As this is a closed beta build, I’m not sure if you’ll be able to create your own crew once the game goes live, but that would likely be an option.

Finally, and something I found very good, are the sight lines of your allies that are visible on your screen. This means you can see where your team mates are looking at any time, which helps to know exactly where you should be providing cover.

The overall experience

An early build is bound to have some bugs, which Spectre Divide has. Gun textures sometimes don’t load in, random frame drops happen, but this is all expected of an early build and the developers will have more than enough time to iron these out before the full release.

Despite any slight bugs, this game is a lot of fun. I haven’t played competitive shooters in many years (I used to frequent Counter Strike 1.6, talk about showing my age). So I can’t comment on what I deem to be odd hit boxes and oddities (like bullets hitting me through solid steel doors).

The art style is definitely something to get used to, and it’s hard on the eyes at first. You do get used to it pretty quickly though, and it’s kind of endearing. It’s something different to the hyper-realism of Counter Strike, for example.

It’s a fast-paced game, with rounds ending in minutes and full matches taking just 20-30 minutes. There’s a lot of satisfaction to be found from nailing that head shot, and the gunplay is fun. There’s not an insane amount of recoil, and handling pretty much all of the weapons is easy enough even for more casual FPS players like myself. Weapon variety is great, too, with even more weapons sure to be added as we go along.

Overall, I’ve enjoyed my time in Spectre Divide, and I would recommend any round-based FPS fans to give it a go. It’s well worth it.

What of its E-sports potential?

I can absolutely see this game quickly becoming an official e-sport. It’s highly skill-based, with teams having to work together coherently in order to achieve success. Running around with no goal or purpose will quickly see your team wiped and your match lost.

It’s quite clear from the whole concept of the game that becoming an e-sport was the whole point from the start. And Mountaintop Studios have nailed it with Spectre Divide. It’s not surprising, considering the experience from veterans of Naughty Dog, Oculus, Respawn, and more.

Obviously, having been out of action in FPS games such as these, I spent most of my time at the bottom of the leader board playing a supporting role to my more skilled (and likely far younger) team mates. I still had fun, but I’m curious to see once Ranked Play unlocks in the full release, if there is more to keep casual players entertained as well.

That’s all I have for you for now. I enjoy Spectre Divide and I recommend it. But I will be there on release day to give you a far more in-depth review of a game that has the potential to finally offer a viable alternative to Counter Strike.

I’ll see you there.

A special thanks to Mountaintop Studios and Evolve PR for supplying the closed beta keys.