The Anacrusis Review

To say The Anacrusis is similar to Left 4 Dead would be a severe understatement. From hordes of mindless monsters, to deadly enemies that spawn regularly and use their special powers to put the party in a jam, to safe rooms that separate each act of an episode, this four-player co-op FPS sticks so close to its inspiration it could almost qualify as a spinoff. Unfortunately, that nostalgic mimicry allows for little in the way of interesting new ideas or even expected modernizations that might have made it more fun, resulting in a flavorless distraction that feels like it could have come out in 2008. Combat is bland and one-note, the graphics are well below the standards of today, and enemy variety is almost nonexistent. The only thing The Anacrusis really has going for itself is a unique disco-era sci-fi setting starring cheeky characters and groovy locales, which would be easier to appreciate if the rest of it wasn’t so woefully bland. It’s been 15 years since the original Left 4 Dead, but The Anacrusis feels sorely stuck in the past.

Alarmingly true to its roots, The Anacrusis has you casually jogging from safe room to safe room until a final showdown at the end of each episode asks you to hold out against an army of baddies. That familiar framework also includes mowing down hundreds of identical monsters (aliens here, instead of zombies) in a hail of blue lasers, which is undermined by some of the most forgettable gunplay in recent memory. Nearly every part of the combat is mediocre, whether it’s the hilariously unintimidating and low-res enemies, the generic laser weapons that all feel like clones of one another, or the eyebrow-raising lack of a sprint button. And even though there are only five episodes to pick from that can be completed in a total of less than four hours, many of the same areas are repeatedly reused, so you can’t even rely on fresh levels to keep things interesting.

Thankfully the otherwise monotonous trek through samey hallways is momentarily elevated whenever one of the special enemy types shows its face, like the Spawner who hides and spits out little turret creatures, the Grabber who ensnares one player and renders them unable to defend themselves until killed, or the Brute who just has lots of health and runs around stomping things. Learning to work as a team and deal with these tricky foes goes a long way in making things more interesting when you’re early on. Unfortunately, even these brief pockets of amusement quickly fade after you’ve been spit on by a Gooper or blinded by a Flasher a handful of times and familiarize yourself with their tactics enough to dispose of them in a few seconds whenever a new one spawns.

No matter what you’re fighting, the weapons you’ll use to do so never stop being disappointing. With only a few variations of the handful of laser-blasting rifles, machine guns, and shotguns (plus a single sidearm to use when you’re out of ammo), you’ll have seen most of the arsenal available to you after just the opening episode. Every once in a while you’ll find an upgraded version of your submachine blaster while exploring the space station’s white corridors, but aside from doing more damage and maybe applying a status effect like Stasis that slows enemies down, there’s not much variety. It’s also just disappointing that most weapons have no personality to them – there’s not a whole lot to distinguish the plasma rifle from the submachine blaster, for example. You also get the odd gadget to play with, like different kinds of grenades that might pull nearby enemies into a vortex or light everyone on fire, or an auto turret that can be deployed to help take down enemies for you, but it’s all very basic stuff I’ve seen in shooters from over ten years ago.

One mildly interesting addition is the ability to customize your playstyle in each game mode by finding Matter Compilers throughout the level and selecting one of three randomly rolled perks. You might gain the useful ability to carry more grenades, regenerate ammo by killing marked enemies, become invulnerable while standing in goo, or automatically mark any special enemy just by aiming at it. Although these are mostly minor upgrades, they do succeed at mixing up the Left 4 Dead formula at least a tiny bit. It definitely feels nice to make your character your own, even if you get stripped of everything once the mission is completed. It would have been nice if this buildcrafting were expanded upon further, because the potential with assigning roles on your team and players forming an area of expertise definitely starts to shine through by the end of most episodes.

For those who enjoy a challenge like me, the increased difficulty options really dial up the stress, with tweaks like removing healing options and upping the size of the hordes. But those minor twists do nothing to remedy the underwhelming gunplay – In fact, if nothing else it just makes it even more frustrating. With so few tools to help you win the day, it feels like the weapons and perks at your disposal don’t properly scale with the threat before you, and with no new enemies, interesting twists, or incentives to tackle higher difficulties, you just end up playing the exact same levels you’ve already run but with things like more deadly friendly fire posing an arbitrarily added threat. Still, it was nice to at least have a mode where I had to stop chatting with friends and actually focus on callouts and positioning instead of just turning my brain off.

For all its gameplay shortcomings though, The Anacrusis definitely stands out with its 70’s style and swagger, complete with interior design that looks like it would be right at home in one of those vans with carpeted walls and beaded curtains. This completely unique aesthetic coupled with its wise-cracking characters gives everything a levity and charm that’s largely absent in its dark and bloody zombie-centric peers, and I was thankful for that distance. Unfortunately, that awesome retro vibe eventually fades once you’ve walked down your 50th empty hallway and ends up feeling like an idea that never got expanded on in early access.

And bizarrely, there’s not much of a story to speak of, with the little plot that does exist delivered via extremely small dialogue snippets from your characters during each episode. All the major questions you might have about why you’re shooting aliens or what’s up with the retro futuristic decor aren’t going to be answered. Instead, you’ll piece together a few things here and there and start to understand the personalities of the survivor quartet the longer you play, but it never gets deeper than the equally shallow gunplay that I’d had my fill of after just a couple hours. That’s really too bad considering the interesting aesthetic is its strongest asset – a fleshed out story might have made it worth sticking around in spite of shortcomings elsewhere.

Aside from the standard episodes, you’ll also find a 4v4 Versus mode that pits one team of player-controlled monsters against an opposing team of survivors. Smartly, this mode is designed with the assumption that the survivors will always lose, since the odds are stacked against them with the alien team spawning infinitely. Once the survivors are killed, the teams switch sides and the winner is determined by whoever survives the longest – a huge improvement compared to Left 4 Dead’s PvP, where the survivors almost always emerged victorious. Taking on the role of the special alien types definitely has some novelty to it too, even if not all those mobs are created equally, like the silly Flasher whose chief characteristic is that he glows brightly, meaning you kinda just stand nearby the survivors until they find the time to kill you. But others, like the Brute, can be a lot of fun to handle as you rampage around stomping your friends flat. It’s definitely The Anacrusis’ most fun game mode, and playing it alongside friends will almost certainly result in plenty of laughs and some good ol’ fashioned trash talk. Sadly, it only has five small levels to play, each of which is pulled from a section of the corresponding episode, giving the whole mode a distinctly tacked on feel to it. After a few rounds, my group quickly moved on, having seen just about all there was to offer.

There’s also a horde mode called Holdout, which sticks you in a small arena to fight waves of aliens instead of going through all the trouble of finding them. There’s really not much to this mode aside from sitting back and shooting everything in sight, occasionally completing objectives like standing in a designated zone to fill up a progress bar. The big twist here is that at the end of five waves, you get to face off against a souped up special boss enemy, complete with a health bar. Regrettably, these are basically just bullet sponges with all the same behaviors as their regular versions, except they can kill you in one hit. But still, it’s at least a nice little wrinkle for a package that contains far too few surprises.

Despite being in Early Access for almost two years, The Anacrusis also still has a number of significant bugs, from enemies attacking me through walls or glitching out by turning into incomprehensible elastic creatures, to cutscenes and UIs behaving erratically, to framerates tanking when lots of enemies catch on fire. Very few issues were bad enough to deter me from continuing on, but it certainly didn’t bolster my rapidly waning interest.