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There’s no shortage of cooperative, horror-themed shooters on the market today. While there are indeed countless examples out there, a few that immediately spring to mind are Aliens: Fireteam Elite, Back 4 Blood, this year’s Redfall and, of course, the gold standard to which they all aspire: Left 4 Dead.
With their latest stab at the formula, Ripout, Pet Project Games are clearly angling to get in on this craze. Unfortunately, with little to offer besides repetitive level design, generic-feeling combat and a glaring lack of personality, it’s difficult to imagine that this one will take off in quite the same way that Valve’s masterpiece did 15 years ago.
Set in the not-too-distant future, the basic premise of Ripout is that humanity has been forced to scour the stars for a new home. Owing to a confluence of factors — including a devastating famine, the subsequent conflict over what few resources remain, and then an opportunistic alien invasion to top it all off — our pale blue dot is no longer habitable. Faced with the prospect of this imminent extinction, Earth’s warmongering governments manage to temporarily put their differences to one side and forge a shaky alliance. Together, they orchestrate a mass evacuation of the planet and send all of the refugees to a neighbouring solar system, where there is purportedly a “Sanctuary” that’s fit to sustain human life.
As part of one of these expeditions, you awaken from cryosleep to find yourself utterly alone and adrift in the vast, uncaring cosmos. Without any precise heading to go by, it’s up to you to find the interstellar promised land by following a trail of breadcrumbs that have been dotted all around the galaxy.
In gameplay terms, this effectively translates to you visiting a series of derelict ships that each house vital clues pointing in the rough direction of Sanctuary. Of course, your mission isn’t totally free of risk, as all of the vessels that you’ll be boarding have been left in disrepair; troubled by electrical hazards, malfunctioning security protocols, and even the occasional vacuum.
More importantly, though, you’ll also have to deal with “The Cell.” Originally created by Earth’s scientists as a way of fending off extra-terrestrial hostiles, it was only a matter of time before these genetically engineered mutants turned against us. And, now that they have, they’re a major pain in the ass!
In addition to being formidable bullet sponges, The Cell are capable of fusing themselves to machinery and switching out their mechanical body parts in order to adapt to any given situation. For example, they could bolt a laser canon to their shoulder, attach a shield to one of their legs or graft with a parasite to sprout new appendages from their head. As you’d expect, this grisly process of self-augmentation typically results in them metamorphosing into hideous, bio-tech abominations that wouldn’t look out of place in a David Cronenberg film.
A Slow Burn Take On Co-op Horror
However, a more apt comparison — for describing both the look of these monsters and the wider game as a whole — would be Doom 3.
Like in that polarizing title, the action is decidedly slow-burn, with you skulking around darkened corridors (that are barely illuminated by your inexcusably crap flashlight) and waiting for something nasty to jump out from an unseen crevice. It’s less “run-and-gun” in that sense and more about taking your time to methodically check every corner and keeping your eye permanently glued to the scanner. Because even a couple of enemies catching you off guard here can be overwhelming, particularly if you don’t have a partner around to resuscitate you.
On that note, while Ripout does accommodate online co-op, it almost feels as though it’s been made with solo-play in mind. Not only is the combat well balanced for one-on-one encounters, but having friends around to back you up would only serve to diminish the intense atmosphere that the developers are so obviously striving for.
After all, this is a game where you’re meant to stew in long periods of uninterrupted quiet, waiting in dreadful anticipation for the next jolt to arrive. You’re supposed to be so on edge that you regard every shadow with furtive distrust, just in case it happens to be concealing some ghastly body-horror freak. It’s not best experienced then with constant wisecracking and laughter being broadcast over the voice chat, or with other players chaotically charging around the environments to speedrun objectives.
Curiously enough, the developers seem to have realized this as well, because if you do take the lone-wolf approach then you won’t be saddled with any hapless A.I. bots to ruin the suspenseful mood. Plus, there’s an opportunity to collect revive tokens along the way so that you’re not put at a disadvantage when you inevitably get ganged up on by The Cell hordes.
I did appreciate these concessions, as they made playing alone for the purposes of this review far more tolerable than it is in the likes of, say, Back 4 Blood or Aliens: Fireteam (wherein your A.I.-controlled buddies are more of a liability than anything else). Alas, this doesn’t change the fact that Ripout’s core loop just isn’t very enjoyable, regardless of whether you are part of a full complement or an army of one.
In Space No One Can Hear You ‘Meh’
The problem is that it gets very samey, very fast. Pet Project are clearly optimistic that their game will have the same longevity that Left 4 Dead has enjoyed for the past couple of decades, but the foundations simply aren’t strong enough in this case.
To their credit, they have tried to encourage replayability with all of their procedurally-generated dungeons. You see, while the layout of individual ships will remain largely unchanged between runs, the actual routes you have to take — as well as the enemy placement, the item distribution and even the mission types — are completely randomized. Which is a nice touch!
Yet no matter how hard the developers try to mix things up, you’re still only going through slight variations on the same tedious drudgery. For instance, the game’s objectives never really evolve much beyond “head over to the highlighted asset and hold down the F button.” Whether you’re interacting with a terminal, searching corpses for key cards or pillaging containers, you’ll quickly notice that it’s a very superficial difference and that you are, for all intents and purposes, performing the same tasks over & over again.
The only time the dynamic meaningfully changes is when countdowns are in effect; usually justified by some in-game text explaining that your vessel is being pulled into the orbit of the sun or something. That level-modifier forces you to play in a totally different way (i.e. with more urgency), but otherwise Ripout feels like it’s stuck in a pretty boring cycle. You enter a ship, kill a couple of interchangeable monsters, interact with the object du jour and then leave through the way you came in.
The randomization also means that huge swathes of the environment tend to be weirdly barren. Indeed, there’s hardly any incentive to stray from the golden path here, as that’s where most of the collectables, resources and Cell encounters are concentrated. As such, any rooms that aren’t explicitly part of the current mission end up having nothing in them whatsoever. No ammo pickups, no ambushes, not even a bit of environmental storytelling. They’re just empty.
There’s little point in exploring the derelicts then, when all you’ve got to do is blindly follow the compass marker from A to B, letting everything else pass you by in a blur. There aren’t even unique set pieces tied to the respective environments to keep you on your toes (akin to the fairground concert in Left 4 Dead 2). Instead, the few potentially interesting landmarks that can be found — such as the multiplex cinema of the future, or areas that have been enveloped by unpruned vegetation — are rarely taken advantage of. Truth be told, you’ll be spending most of your time fighting through bland corridors and drab industrial settings.
Close Encounters of the So-So Kind
Embarking on quests therefore begins to feel like a grind after a while, even when you are doing them for the very first time. To be fair, the Cell are reasonably interesting foes (largely on account of how their behaviours and attack patterns will adapt once they take on new parts), but fighting them isn’t anywhere near as thrilling as it ought to be.
The gunplay is technically functional — you aim down the sights, squeeze the trigger and then a bullet is propelled in the intended direction — yet that’s about as good as it gets. None of the weapons are particularly satisfying to use and, apart from the fact that your enemy’s life bar depletes whenever you hit them, you don’t really get the sense that you’re making much of an impact. Without squelchier audio or more responsive animations, it feels like you might as well be emptying a BB gun into your opponent. The shotgun is especially feeble in that regard, which is almost a cardinal sin for this genre.
There are a number of other minor quibbles that pile up the longer you play as well. Most notably, there are gravity well traps (pulling you into compromising positions and then inflicting damage) that are so hard to discern that even a holocaust-denying, 9/11 truthing, flat-earther wouldn’t be paranoid enough to spot them.
Furthermore, there are security droids that unexpectedly lash out if you get on their bad side. The issue being that I’m not entirely sure what transgression is supposed to trigger said aggro. At first, it seems like you’re meant to sneak past them using the crouch mechanic, but that only works approximately half the time and you can’t run past them either.
It could well be that there are precise rules dictating what sets them off but, if that’s the case, they’re not adequately explained. And that’s a fairly big problem when a single hit from one of these fuckers can take off such a massive chunk of your health. It feels like an arbitrary cheap shot every time it happens, and I always let out an exasperated sigh whenever I see one of the robots stationed at the end of a hallway I’ve got to traverse.
A Chance At Redemption
Granted, Ripout is still in early access and there is room for these kinks to be ironed out via imminent patches. The development roadmap even promises that new objective types and weapons are on the cards, which could go some way towards addressing the other aforementioned flaws in this review.
One thing that doesn’t need fixing, however, is the super-cool Pet Gun. The saving grace of Ripout, this mechanic was what originally caught our eye when we previewed the title over at Gamescom 2023, and it continues to be its standout feature at launch.
In a nutshell, regardless of whether you choose a sniper, an assault rifle, a shotgun or a flamethrower, your primary weapon will always have a little critter attached to its magazine. Acting as your trusty helper, this creature can emit a sonar wave that highlights nearby loot, pounce on adversaries to distract them (or potentially “Ripout” their brains) and, best of all, it can retrieve those very same modules that the Cell use to enhance themselves.
When it comes to the latter, you will notice that the derelicts here are teeming with small arachnoids that each have their own specific abilities (which will in turn be transferred to anyone who bonds with them). By default, these symbiotes will try and scuttle towards enemies to give them a corresponding buff, but if your pet happens to catch them first then it will return to your gun and you’ll suddenly have the upper hand. Sometimes you’ll be treated to an alternative fire (like a freeze blast or a heavy-duty laser) while on other occasions you might get an improved melee attack, a defensive shield or a teleportation gadget.
In addition to giving the game an attention-grabbing gimmick, the pet gun also adds a welcome layer of strategy to proceedings. You see, the catch is that you can only ever have one of these modules equipped at a given time, forcing you to select the right tool for the right job. It’s a lot of fun subsequently testing out all of the different power-ups and, once you get the hang of it, you can actually start chaining together interesting combos by switching between attachments on the fly, or by coordinating with our friends in multiplayer.
If future updates can build upon this USP, then it might give Ripout the edge it sorely needs to stand out in the crowded co-op horror genre. Let’s hope that’s the case because, otherwise, this is a fairly unremarkable (albeit inoffensive) experience that’s going to struggle to carve out much of an audience for itself.
Published by 3D Realms, Ripout is available now on Steam Early Access.
Review code provided by the publisher.