Guns of Icarus: Alliance

Phileas Fogg took to the skies in a hot air balloon and went around the world in 80 days. Now imagine if he'd done that with a few friends in a steam-punk airship, brimming with cannons and blasting other blimps to smithereens. Sounds like fun? If so then Guns of Icarus: Alliance might just be the game you've been waiting for.

Muse Games' online action game has recently launched on PlayStation 4, but it has been knocking around on the PC for a while now. Guns of Icarus is an online multiplayer game where teams of four players take various roles on a zeppelin and go to war in the skies, fighting for one of six factions. It's heavily weighted on the idea of teamwork, so if you don't play well with others, now might be the time to look for a different aerial adventure.

To get the most out of your time you really do need a headset to engage in the chat as your captain will be handing out orders all the time. You can always go rogue and do what you want, but in our experience that seemed to rock the air-boat a bit too much. Due to the fact that it's cross-platform, you can talk to people on Steam PC and on PS4. What this essentially means is you find a lot of veteran PC players advising and supporting the PlayStation newcomers. We really enjoyed the guidance of the old-hands who made us feel like new arrivals at an established club.

Listening to your elders is really useful advice as it's actually a pretty difficult game to just jump in and get straight to the action. There are some limited tutorials, but most of the learning is to be had while playing. The tutorials themselves are pretty bland and don't really show you what it's like to be in the game. It's one thing calmly running around banging things with your hammer, it's quite something else to do it under fire while listening to some screaming captain shouting at you where to go.

Teamwork is the key and you have the option of taking the role of pilot, gunner, or engineer. The engineer basically has to run around fixing things and the first tutorial shows you how and which tool to use when fixing the balloon, hull, engines or guns.

It may sound a little bit on the dull side to be the handy-man of the ship, but once you get in the air and your pilot starts barking orders at you, you really get sucked into the role. You can always disobey your orders and hop on the guns, but be prepared to fail as your ship plummets to the ground through lack of maintenance. You soon discover how vital the engineer is to the success of your mission and it isn't just a crappy role that means you miss out on all the action.

The gunner has to know which ammo to use and when to use it for maximum effect. Being a gunner might sound like more fun than patching up holes, but in truth, it has the same exhilaration as the other two classes. The pilot, as you can probably imagine, is responsible for guiding the ship through the warzones. The role can at times be a little on the stressful side if you don't know what you're doing, with people calling out where the enemy is in relation to your ship. You control elevation along with velocity, and your spatial awareness needs to be at a high-level as you navigate your way through tight gaps. The pilot role was by far our favourite, but it takes some time to get into the swing of it before you really know what you're doing, but once you do, there's a lot of fun to be had.

The game is split between two different modes. The first is PvP where up to 32 players man their respective airships, taking to the sky to blow each other out of it. Get ready for the thrill as your captain screams at you to mend damage or shoot at anything that moves. This deathmatch mode sees you vying to be the first crew to get to a designated number of kills. The second is a co-op mode which sees you and other players from your faction join forces to eliminate AI-controlled opposition. The games on average take around 10 to 15 minutes, but the major drawback is waiting to be matched with other players which can take a few minutes.

Once you're on board your ship you'll run around doing your duty and, for the most part at least, everything works as it should. That said, at times the controls can feel a little floaty and you often find yourself falling off the side of the ship to your untimely death. Don't panic, as you re-spawn pretty quickly, but this feels like a hangover from the PC controls.

The ships themselves look absolutely gorgeous and there are lots of different designs to see and blow up. You can also customise your own avatar and ship which adds more a persona feel to the experience. The environmental graphics are sweet and there's a fog that makes you feel like you're soaring through canyons; it all adds to the atmosphere.

At the end of each battle, you'll be rewarded with XP and gold that you can use to spend on boosting your faction's war effort on the war maps. This makes it feel that every single battle counts. If you can't find other players to play with then the AI will step up, but it's nowhere near as good and it means that the whole experience will be based on their support. All too often we found AI-controlled crewmembers on board with us and that certainly lessened the experience.

All in all, there's a lot of fun to be had once you get to grips with Guns of Icarus: Alliance. For the price being asked it's well worth a look as it offers something a little different for PS4. With Xbox One players getting Sea of Thieves for some multiplayer teamwork, Alliance might have come at just the right time. That said, it can be a little impenetrable at first so get ready to slog it out for a few hours before you master it or even come to love it. There are lots of very cool ideas in here, most of which are pulled off quite well. The one thing that may let it down is the lack of players, but if enough people take a punt and it can build up the community it needs to endure then this may well be a game that stays in your playlist for many, many hours.