Picture the 22nd Century, the success mankind has achieved, the pinnacle of technology and advancement, humanity is prospering and living in a glorious reign of power and joy. Then scrap all that, because in Livelock that most certainly isn’t where humans sit on the scale of power. Instead, humanity lives underground – in Eden, and are just barely clinging to survival whilst the surface is dominated by Clusters – corrupt groups of machines fighting over the scraps of what is left of Planet Earth – locked in an infinite war for resources.
Livelock, developed by Tuque Games and published in partnership with Perfect World, you take the role of one of three Capital Intellects. An intellect is a human consciousness uploaded into a ‘Chassis’. This is where your gameplay begins. Livelock requires you to take one of the three into the main campaign mode (or multiplayer with two others if you desire) and each Chassis plays uniquely different from the others. There are clear and immediate differences between the three that suit various playstyles and personalities.
Vanguard is the hulking melee mass that can both take and dish out a lot of damage, Hex is the long range sniper/tactical fighter and Catalyst is your support class, offering a bit of damage, a bit of healing and a bit of cover fire. What becomes immediately obvious after level five of all three play-throughs, is that the game is definitely, definitely both improved and easier when you enter into it in Co-Op mode, whether it be with a friend or a stranger. Vanguard is extremely susceptible to long-range fire and struggles to close the gap quickly enough to negate the damage being spat out, Hex struggles against melee foes – doing a lot of damage himself but taking a lot of melee damage in return, and Catalyst who, being a support, struggles when she has no one to heal or support.
The graphics in the game are stunning and when on high (definitely suggest playing on high) will chug smaller, less powerful machines. However the aesthetics of the game as a whole are very, very pleasing to the eye. The character models are fantastic and I loved the addition of swapping out helmets, capes and bodies in the Machine Lab, allowing you to differentiate your character from every other character. The environments are also well crafted and, in addition to being fun to look at, are almost one hundred percent destructible. Pillars fall, cars get shunted with force, walls collapse and, in quite a few cases, destroying the environment will lead to bonus caches or hidden pockets of loot.
The game’s audio and scripting is a weird mix of cliche and hilarity. The Capital Intellects are, after all, humans transferred into the body of a robot. So you’ve got mixes of cockiness, sassiness, ego, humility and tranquility depending on whom you play. The “Narrator” of the story is an Artificial Intelligence and their voice is, understandably, droning – however, after a while, it gets a little bit too much and you end up just skipping the dialogue once you’ve read the script.
Unfortunately, multiplayer mode seems currently unplayable. Now whilst this is just from the three multiplayer matches we experienced, the bugginess of clipping and my co-player disappearing altogether happened almost every twenty to thirty seconds. Unfortunately, so much so that when I was playing as Catalyst I couldn’t land healing shots from my rifle nor place my turret in a region anywhere near where I thought my Vanguard buddy was. Additionally, playing Vanguard in a co-op match meant that I was tanking enemies in an area where my sniper co-player was not. We were playing on a 30 Up 3 Down connection so we know it wasn’t the internet, certainly not to that degree. We’re going to reach out to Tuque games and see if there are any known errors with multiplayer as the rest of the game seemed too flawless to have such glaring errors in multiplayer.
We would really like to see the campaign be improved so that the difficulty doesn’t *require* a co-operative play through. Additionally, maybe some of Catalyst’s abilities could change depending on whether she’s playing Solo or Multiplayer. Catalyst in Solo, unless her turrets are dramatically improved, is a really difficult choice. We found that Vanguard was the only seriously competitive choice in solo play with Hex being a close second – but still difficult due to ROF and the fact they’re a heavily ranged class.
All in all, Livelock, especially once it’s released from its initial design phase, looks to be a seriously unique take on the top-down game market and a genuinely enjoyable romp.
Should you buy? We say yes. Multiplayer connection issues pending, definitely yes. The game is a really good step in the right direction for an under-developed market. The top down game genre certainly isn’t anything popular outside of MOBA land, but Livelock seems to have really nailed their direction. To boot, you get a great story, good voice acting and really unique character choices. We believe Tuque games (though they haven’t said so) also have more chassis options up their sleeve that they’re going to release. Which will make the game even more replayable.
Livelock is a polished top-down shooter mixed with RPG elements that will greatly appeal to the shooting aficionado in us all.
Leif from Sirus Gaming: "Livelock is a top-down multiplatform shooter game with elements of single-player and coop multiplayer gameplay. Think Transformers with a human mind."
EB: Livelock is a cooperative twin-stick shooter created by Tuque Games, an independent Canadian developer. In this game’s alternate reality, humanity had to store their collective consciousness into machines known as Intellects after an extraterrestrial object crashed into the earth and made it uninhabitable for organic life forms. The players take the role of one of the three Capital Intellects, the first to be uploaded into a robotic Chassis, trying to free humanity from the machines known as the Abaddon. These include Catalyst, a support specialist, Hex, a skilled marksman, and Vanguard, a soldier of brute force. After the Cataclysm, humanity created Eden, a device that could bring organic life back to the world. Humanity created an advanced AI known as SATCOM, who serves as the player’s guide, to guide humanity’s transition back to organic life. When the game begins, the player is one of the few remaining Capital Intellects whom SATCOM guides through the game to strive for humanity’s salvation.
