Reviewed by Geir Gunnarsson
“Created by Savage Studios, S.C.A.R. (A.K.A. Simulating Carnage And Rockets) is a First-Person Shooter, that as-the-name-implies, simulates carnage. Face endless hordes of monsters and mutated beasts, with only one goal in mind. Your demise!
Slay your way through the stages, enter portals, and wield various multi utility weapons against your foes.
You are also equipped with a hook that can latch on to any surface, to which you can grapple over to, or repel from. Complete with a suitably powerful and aggressive soundtrack to match the environment, enemies and bosses. S.C.A.R. offers you a retro experience of monster killing and bloody action.” That pretty much sums up this game and if you like the FPS’ of old, you’ll most likely enjoy this game. It seems like the love child of all the most popular FPS’ from the 90’s with a dash of DOOM 2016 and a smattering of DOOM Eternal. The gameplay feels like the games of old, peppered with the movement abilities of the newer DOOM games, double jump, dash, sliding crouch and a grappling hook (hence the DOOM Eternal reference).
It can be quite fun zooming about the place and killing enemies, especially if you enjoy the act of “gibbing”. Plenty of meaty chunks fly everywhere if you do enough damage to the enemies. The positional abilities are not without faults, for example the double jump does not always register and in my experience always at the wrong time, but that could just be optimization troubles rather than a bug. I also feel the game needs a “vault” ability, as I experienced way too many times after successfully double jumping, triple dashing and grappling around the map; my goal failed at the end because I was just slightly below the edge of the platform I was trying to get to and had to redo it all over again.
I thought the designs of the enemies were unoriginal and the ones I saw just reminded me of other games from the 90’s. Bloody claws on the early enemies reminds me of the enemies in Quake and the half body flying enemy is pretty much just the Assault Commander from Duke Nukem 3D.
The enemies are bullet sponges but that is pretty consistent with the games of old. The weapons feel underpowered, there is no impact to them and the enemies seem not to notice them until they die.
They are also not very imaginative or original, though there is an interesting mechanic whereby you gain “skill points” for killing which fill a meter. Once filled you can activate a overpower mode which upgrades the weapons; the pistol gets a rapid fire mode (which makes it slightly better), the shotgun gets a grenade launcher mode, the rocket launcher gets a homing rocket and the sniper rifle becomes a rebar launcher that pins enemies to the wall (think the crossbow in Half-Life). I assume the sniper rifle lets you kill many enemies at once as long as they are lined up but I did not witness this myself.
The review copy I played did not contain the whole game and I only had access to the first chapter/campaign. There were different sections but when I tried to access them it just said “Coming Soon”. The bit I had access to had a few levels and a couple of bosses. It took me about 40 minutes to finish this chapter and only that long since the first boss confused me a little about how to kill him, it was not very clear what I was supposed to do but after about 20 minutes of dying and retrying I managed to “gib him good”. That particular boss did make good use of all the players movement abilities and once you understand what you need to do, he was quite simple (but isn’t that how it always is?). Right after I killed the boss, I got thrown into another boss which was not as “complicated”, this boss was just dodge attacks and fill him full of lead kind of boss while avoiding other enemies and using them to fill your skill meter though this boss didn’t really need that. All in all S.C.A.R. is a decent dose of nostalgia and scratches an itch, but really only recommend to those who are itchy and specifically nostalgic for 90’s FPS’
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