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Hollowpoint

Hollowpoint

After our first hands-off look at Ruffian Games' shooter we finally grab a controller and enter the battlefield for some frontline impressions.

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Our introduction to Hollowpoint, a promising co-op shooter, was a hands-off demo and interview with developer Ruffian Games at this year's Paradox Convention. Even then we were itching to play.

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Happily we finally got to grab a controller at Sony's Digital Gaming Showcase this week in London, and the gameplay matched the sell. We even jumped in for a second helping, playing alongside the studio's Martin Livingston, as the event wrapped up. It's got that instant pick-up and play attitude that clicks with us.

As with a lot of titles at the Showcase, the build was early, basic designs for the menu systems as we navigated contracts, locations and Operatives. But once through to the game proper, things moved at a cracking pace.

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Quick recap: it's a 2.5D platform shooter. The stages we played are multilevelled arenas with a labyrinth of corridors, stairs, ladders and open areas, and you've to race to different objective points around the map as part of your active contract. You're locked to the 2D plane, but enemies swarm into the stage from entry points behind you in the 3D background. You try and pick them off through sharpshooting from cover, and mop up the rest when they arrive on your 2D field.

It's immediately a lot of fun. A cross-blend of cover shooter, rail gun game and platformer, with a heavier emphasis on the first than what we've seen in the genre previously. Operatives have that floaty leap and auto ledge grab akin to more modern genre entries like Shadow Complex, as well as an 8-way directional fire with the right stick that's the hallmark of the Contra series.

And like Konami's shooter series, Hollowpoint's cast come packing. Early favourite is the group's sharpshooter, Clint Eastwood in a sci-fi exo-suit, their pistol feeling nicely weighty in its trigger-pull and kickback. Every Operative has a secondary, and Clint's is a rocket launcher. Perfect for clearing out groups of soldiers in hiding.

But you've also your more traditional heavies mixed in with assault rifles and hefty sniper rifles that feel like they could take out a tank. Head-shots are essential, not just to clear out enemies faster but for better reward drops and that sense of accomplishment in being a bad-ass. And despite its arcade nature, there's satisfaction in coordinating attacks with team-mates. There's option for four-player, though today's demo only allows for single pairings. Yet we still plan out how to take out a mini-gun-carrying behemoth, with Matt playing bait and us flanking around behind. The titan is surprisingly agile, leaping onto a higher platform and unbeknownst to him, just missing the rocket we launched at his exposed rear end.

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We expect multiple enemy types, and therefore different strategies to tackle them with. Ruffian tantalise us with talk of multiple fully customisable Operatives to tailor or base play style around. Nicely? You can quick-switch between any four stocked specialists during a game, though it takes a few seconds to transfer between your characters. Each Operative also comes stocked with additional passive abilities, rotated through on the D-Pad, such as dashes or short-term regen, and some abilities can benefit nearby teammates too.

Hollowpoint

Objectives played during our time involved tracking down prisoners (though first we had to track down and knock out the guard carrying the cell keys) and clearing one area of several enemy waves. The latter had us install a sentry gun to chew through the majority of the attackers, though shortly the tables turned as we came under fire from an enemy turret. It forced us to track its protruding cables back to its power source and disable that.

It's small things like that which make this more than a brainless shooter. For example, floating sentry bots project a circular shield to protect enemy groups, leaving you to work out how to get close enough to down the bot but still avoid getting shot at point-blank range.

The only small concern we have currently is the lack of a straightforward campaign to emphasis a sense of progression. Currently you'll sign up to multiple contracts which offer randomised objectives, with some time-limited special contracts dropped into the mix by the developers to promote weekly or even daily challenges. Levels are seemingly randomised and sourced from architectural and design pools. The emphasis then really is in solidifying your Operatives' skill sets and testing them out in battle.

It's absolutely fine as it stands, but we're left hankering for a a little more structure, a sense of progression beyond pimping out our characters. We're reminded of XBLA's Castlevania: Harmony of Despair, which dropped various franchise characters into huge randomised maps and left to kill their way through them. It quickly became tiring, despite the sense of cooperation.

We're hoping that won't be the case with Hollowpoint, and we'll find out when the game comes out later this year.

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Hollowpoint

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