Scars Above: Many inspirations, but no defined identity

Humanity has always looked to the sky, always questioning what lies beyond our blue planet. Other habitable worlds? New ways of life? It is with this premise that “Scars Above” begins, as a kickoff to the events presented by the game.

In addition to third-person shooter gameplay, the game also mixes several other styles throughout the journey to try to give the adventure a different feel.

It’s all in space

The story begins with a cutscene explaining that a mysterious artifact, which they call a metahedron, suddenly appeared in Earth’s orbit and so a team called SCAR (Systematization of Contact with Rational Aliens) was soon sent to investigate and discover what is the artifact and what it is actually doing there.

The premise is simple, but it works if the developers manage to take advantage of it to just insert the player for what matters, which is playing the game. There is a tutorial before the game’s main mission starts, but it’s very brief and soon we’ll get into the skin of the protagonist who we’ll control until the end of the game.

The protagonist, Kate Ward, is one of the members of the group that gives the game its name and who finds herself involved in strange events after the incident with the team’s spaceship.

And after these initial events, it is very evident the various inspirations that the game sought to differentiate itself. Right away, inspiration is noticeable in “Returnal”, an award-winning game from the Housemarque studio, where the initial scenario is full of cryptic messages and you are thrown there without much understanding, leaving an instigating air together with a dark environment and strange creatures.

And adding more things to the list, we also have devices that work as save points in case the player dies, go back to that location, remembering the mechanics of “Souls-like” games, but here much smoother, since if you go back to At this point after dying, there aren’t many penalties when this happens: here you don’t lose the experience you’ve accumulated along the way and your weapons’ ammo is replenished. And of course, we also have limited healing items here that are recharged each time you return to these points.

The game’s progression is very linear and the player doesn’t have much problem returning at certain points in the journey to collect upgrades for the weapons that he will use throughout the game. Weapons that, despite only four, are quite varied and the game plays with the elements of each one. Although you can get the last one in the final moments of the game and you have little to learn which enemies to use it on.

The Best of Scars Above

The gameplay here is the best point of “Scars Above”, despite the fact that the game gives you a melee weapon right from the start, which soon becomes obsolete. But so far so good, because the gameplay with firearms is even interesting.

Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for the variety of enemies, which boil down to a low number and arriving in other biomes, we have almost only a recolor with exchanged abilities and weaknesses.

Of course, the game also has equipment to give you more gameplay alternatives, such as minor healing, a shield to improve defense, and a distracting item to get you out of the enemy’s focus.

However, saying that it is the best point does not mean that it does not have problems, because when the gameplay mixes with the little variety of enemies, the player is faced with something that does not change until the end of the game.

You end up learning enemy patterns and the final boss is even a variation of an enemy from the game. But on the other hand, “Scars Above” does not have any enemies with unbalanced difficulty and the levels of the challenges it has are even good.

The story of the game is very simple and all doubts that are presented at the beginning are explained. But here there is a bad addiction to using jargon with sci-fi terms to try to give credibility to the characters, but they are placed so randomly that they are forgotten.

Not that this is a negative point, as the game is based on gameplay, but being able to create a plot that instigates and questions the player is also a way to trap him in the game world.

In addition, there was also a lack of better inspiration in the production of the soundtrack, which sometimes resembles “Mass Effect”, but which is often confused in the moments of the game. It is not a detriment either, but as a point that I look at and notice a lot in games, I expected at least a somewhat memorable soundtrack.

Lack of polishing can harm the experience

Up until this point, what you can tell what “Scars Above” lacked was a little more polish. There are interesting ideas in the game and even including the design of the alien race that helps the protagonist, but which gains little prominence in the adventure until the final moments.

With a little more care, Mad Head Games could make the experience a little better and with less robotic animations.

With all these points, livestreaming the game can yield some interesting moments for the audience, get some laughs and, in the end, generate some engagement with the audience using references to the game’s inspirations.

“Scars Above” did not present any performance issues and technically shouldn’t present challenges for players to stream the game to their audience.

Katsutoshi