A decent sci-fi shooter with a surprisingly good story | Full Review - Scars Above

Scars Above is a new third person sci-fi shooter that puts players in the shoes of Kara, and a scientist who’s part of a team tasked to investigate a mysterious alien structure that randomly appeared in Earth’s orbit.

🟩Pros

+Creative and fun gameplay mechanics

+Challenging and interesting use of enemies

+Surprisingly good story

🟥Cons

-Very janky cinematic presentation

-Awful level design

Suddenly, everything blacks out, and you are stranded on an alien planet, your crew is missing, and you have nothing except questions and your trusty science-y brain to survive.

Funny faces

Scars Above gives us a somewhat mixed-feeling introduction with its janky and funny looking facial and body animations that will remind you of Mass Effect Andromeda’s shaky launch.

The story is immediately gripping from the start

In some ways, it really feels like Mass Effect, especially in the introduction sequence where you are introduced to the spaceship and are roaming about the premises, the background music sounds like Mass Effect too. Surprisingly, despite the janky presentation, the premise and story is surprisingly gripping and well-written.

The game is rich in lore and storytelling, immediately evident with the introduction sequence, interactive objects, and background news reports full of natural plot exposition. The mystery is nicely balanced with the exposition, giving you enough info to make sense of the on-going story but at the same time more questions are coming into the equation.

This trend continues throughout the game, the levels scattered with bits of information and audio logs further explaining the story and your eventually missing crew members. One minor gripe is that you cannot play audio logs in the background and have to unnecessarily stay at the menus to listen.

Other than the janky cutscene movements, the voice acting, presentation, and graphics is actually of good quality and can pass as an AAA game. Even the in-game animations aren’t really that bad.

Gameplay Analysis

The entire gameplay premise reminds me of Returnal: alone, stranded on a strange alien world, and you have to survive amongst hostile alien animals while uncovering the mystery behind it all. The comparisons end there, as the gameplay and story is vastly different.

Scars Above encourages thorough exploration and investigation to find out more about the story. It involves forensic-like mechanics of scanning around the area, finding evidence, and sometimes recreating what happened at the scene  ̶o̶f̶ ̶c̶r̶i̶m̶e̶.  The story going in tandem with the exploration mechanics go well with each other, with the players being motivated to investigate, driving the gameplay forward.

The main character is lost, that does not mean that players should be too

However it is also its own detriment, as the exploration does not hold your hand even in the slightest bit and sometimes leaves the player wandering for far too long. Even with these drawn out segments, the game is relatively short, beatable under 10 hours. A compressed game focusing entirely on the action would have been better, while also cutting the expected time to beat by a few more hours.

Fun Gunplay Mechanics

The gunplay is grounded and overall feels like a great shooter from the PS3/X360 era, which again will get us back to the Mass Effect comparison. The gunplay is solid, the hits are weighty and the enemies are varied enough to be a formidable challenge that’s going to make you work.

Melee combat on the other hand is more annoying than useful, with its stiff animation and janky collision system, constantly getting in your way, hitting you or blocking your way even if you aren’t really touching against each other.

Avatar: The Gun

Scars Above offers four elemental guns to use, each with their own advantages and disadvantages to enemies and environmental obstacles — Similar to Starlord’s Elemental Gun from Guardians of the Galaxy. They can also interact with the environment and with each other, creating for some fascinating combos like freezing your enemy before hitting them with lightning, or luring them over water to electrocute them.

Beautiful, but flawed

The world is alien and natural looking at the same time, rocky regions with lush flora that looks otherworldly infested with alien biomaterial, filled with both harmless and dangerous faunas alike that you need to survive in using your trusty tools and equipment. It is a semi-open world, with different mini open world zones divided into an overall linear progression.

Despite the beauty of it all, the level design is awful: constant back and forths, inadequate hints to progress, and hard to memorize and recognize pathways and areas. Except for the incessant use of jumpscares with enemies jumping out of swamps, the enemy placement is largely predictable when it comes to spawns. Open areas will always mean there is a boss fight coming.

Creative boss fights

Speaking of boss fights, they gave me flashbacks of playing Dark Souls with the difficulty level but honestly, they’re not just bullet sponge enemies that you’d have to keep dodging away from until they’re dead. It is much more than that with its interesting and challenging fights that require reflexes and creative use of your different elemental abilities and gadgets. Some will require you to switch weapons mid-game because of vulnerabilities, or maybe to counter its attacks.

Saving and dying is basically the same thing, it places you at that last save point and refreshes all enemies in the area, as well as your health and ammos. Basically what the game tells you is that don’t spam saves or you’ll constantly respawn all enemies. Only save when entering new areas. This is a novel mechanic that is neither rogue-lite, save-based, nor checkpoint based.

Light RPG Mechanics

An unfortunate design decision but leveling up is heavily tied to the exploration and story progression only. Only by defeating bosses you will gain exp, while exploring every corner of the different levels will also grant you bonus exp to level up. Leveling up will allow you to choose perks for your character, it adds a minor RPG flavor to the game.

Cool meaningful weapon upgrades along the way are also obtainable in the map that slowly improves how the weapon functions. As well as gadgets like grenades. Providing small amounts of refreshments and buffs to the player as they progress to keep things fresh.

Conclusion:

The game is interesting in its core with its solid gunplay, engaging elemental mechanics, and intriguing story. However these interesting parts are so few and far between because of the drawn out exploration mechanic. Ultimately, Scars Above is an above average game for an average price. I still recommend it, provided that you temper your expectations.