PREVIEW : Incision (PC)
INCISION is a harsh, quick, and ruthless throwback to the past, influenced by the first-person shooter genre’s founding fathers, including Doom, Quake, Blood, and Shadow Warrior. Intense carnage that will turn the town bloody is what INCISION gives as a reward for the player’s ability and concentration. It’s an easy task you have. To stop the growth, annihilate it all by cutting, shooting, burning, and decimating it. The frailty of mercy. Waiting is dying.
The challenge of INCISION is meant to be ruthless, but the player never feels helpless in the face of peril. As long as they don’t do it to you first, your arsenal of various, potent, loud weapons will easily transform adversaries into sticky crimson puddles. The gameplay never suffers due to the tale; movement is quick and responsive.
WALKING ARSENAL
Eight weapons of mass destruction, each with potent alternate shooting options. Use your shotgun to fire a barrage of bouncing incendiary bombs. Use your heavy machine gun to fire grenades at your opponents to transform them into the crimson mist. Use your trusted revolver in tricks to increase the amount of damage it can deal. Spray a barrage of four incendiary rockets, and watch as even your most formidable adversary is reduced to ashes in your path. Go berserk with a saw-spear that can be used as a buzzsaw at close range or a long-range slashing weapon.
PULSATING NIGHTMARE SCAPE
The world of INCISION has been converted into a nightmare come to life, where a mass of machine and flesh coexist in an unholy union. All that is familiar and comforting to us has been transformed into a labyrinthine network of factories that are infernal, rusted, and pulsing. These factories act as the nerves and organs for a bigger creature that only wants to join, combine, and develop.
HELL PATROL
All life in the world has been combined and joined by The Growth, transforming its inhabitants into machine-freaks who are all programmed to turn anyone who disagrees with their dictatorship inside-out. A robotic spider-priest is known as a “Spiderpope” with homing missiles, burst-firing energy guns, insane sycophants, and enhanced warriors. The creatures in INCISION will keep you on the edge of your seat right up to the gruesome end.
HEAD-BANGING & SKULL-RATTLING
Frédérick Chicoine’s “iNi” composed the score for INCISION. The album is filled with ambient metal and a horror ambience that will fill your veins with adrenaline.
GAMEPLAY
The arsenal does its job, and the controls are excellent. One of the most entertaining guns I’ve used in a while has to be the revolver.
The choice to exclude any form of middle-level saving is an intriguing one. If you die, the map resets to its initial position. Sometimes you can find extra lives, and those serve as an instant resurrection, much like Doom Eternal.
Extra lives sometimes carry over to the next level, sometimes they don’t. I’m not sure if this is a flaw or an intentional feature. All of your additional lives will be lost if you load a save after quitting the game.
I’ve heard some complaints about this, but as long as the maps aren’t very lengthy (which, so far, they aren’t), I don’t mind beginning over. The only moment I became frustrated was when fighting the first boss since you have to relive a tiny portion of the area each time you die. The remainder is good.
Difficulty-wise I tried it out on the “intended” setting, and it was about as I had anticipated. Quite challenging, but not too hard. It took some time for my FPS abilities to reawaken, but once they did, everything went without a hitch.
PREVIEW : Isles of Etherion (PC)
