SNEAK PEEK: Disintegration

Bicycles with wings

Overview

Disintegration is an FPS/RTS hybrid where you command a small team of three soldiers, while also piloting a gravcycle, a small flying motorcycle. Matches are played in 5 person teams and, in this technical beta, in two maps with two different game modes. Disintegration brings a gameplay that, while already seen in the past, feels out of the ordinary, to say the least. Consider the fact that not only you have to shoot your opponent down their gravbikes, but you also have to watch out from the enemy fireteams and manage yours. This creates and mix of shooter and tactical game: does it works? Well… sometimes… but not always.

Gamemodes

Of the two game modes the beta offered, one was a pretty simple territory control, where the teams had to fight for the control of three points, which gained them points. The second game mode was a kind of capture the flag, but with an attacking team and a defending team, and two flags. These two kinds of matches were pretty solid in my opinion and worked well within the scope of the game. At the start of each round, each player has to pick a squad (formed by a gravcycle and the ground fireteam), with the limit of two picks of the same squad per team, which is not a big deal since there is a good variety of squads that can cover different situations (even if they are not perfectly balanced).

A game that’s not ready… yet

The main problem of Disintegration is that the frenetic rhythms of the matches tend to destroy the strategic portion of the game which, in turn, becomes only a shooter with strange spaceships. During a fight there is little to no time to manage the ground fireteam that, in the end, is always following us and shooting at random stuff: their abilities are almost never used and very often they end dead on the ground, with not enough effect on the game.

The small maps tends also to favour rush strategies where a single player is pinned down in 1v2 or 1v3 fights, with basically no chances to win, especially if the defending player is using a gravcycle with a low rate of fire.

On the technical side

Disintegration also has some problems regarding its technical side: textures and models could use some more work, while maps could use a little more work and elements, as they appear rather empty and uninteresting. The destruction of the maps is relegated to small elements that have little to no impact in the actual gameplay, also because of the low firepower of the gravcycles. Luckily, the game appears the be very stable and bug-free, and with some more work also graphics and destructibility can be improved.

Overall, Disintegration is a game in beta state and it plays like it: there are problems to solve and aspects to improve, so we’ll have to see whether its critical aspects will be polished upon release, or if the game will end up with empty servers because of its problems. Stay tuned!