Game Pass is already a fantastic value in gaming, but beginning tomorrow, it gets some truly massive additions by way of No Man’s Sky, Kingdom Hearts, and more, and right now Amazon and Best Buy are offering 3-month Game Pass Unlimited subscriptions for $22.99.
Right now, Microsoft is running its Xbox Deals Unlocked sale, with huge discounts on tons of games and even consoles. The best deal in the sale, in my opinion, is for 3-months of Game Pass Ultimate. If you buy it today, you can be playing No Man’s Sky tomorrow and for three months after that.
At the metal heart of Disintegration’s multiplayer is an interesting idea: a first-person shooter that blends aerial vehicle combat with real-time strategy tactics. It’s a great pitch, but after jumping into the fray during a handful of pre-release multiplayer sessions, that concept doesn’t seem to live up to its exciting potential. Disintegration is undoubtedly different from any other competitive FPS out there, but the novelty of zipping through the sky on a hoverbike eventually gives way to its relatively shallow strategic core.
Each player in this 5v5 squad shooter pilots their own levitating gravcycle while also commanding a small team of AI robotic troops to fight from the ground and directly interact with objectives. But with guns bolted to your ride, you’ll act as both soldier and general, having to simultaneously engage in firefights while directing your team to support you, adding an extra layer of decisions to make during each encounter.
The first-person floating and shooting can be jarring to even the staunchest FPS player, but the controls are straightforward enough that it only took me a couple of rounds to get a hang of sky surfing. That said, it’s made more complex when you consider that there are nine different types of cycles to choose from, all with their own set of generally familiar weapons and maneuverability quirks to learn. Shotguns, for example, have that recognizable boom, but lack the recoil and devastating bite featured in most contemporary shooters – presumably because it’s mounted to a flying metal death machine and shooting other armored death machines.
I’ve come to really like zooming around the three mode-specific maps. They feature plenty of tall structures to weave between and low overhangs to dip under and over when you’re trying to lose a pursuer. Faster gravcycles feel especially fun to blaze around in, as the speed really ramps up the pressure during some tougher chases. Oddly, though, the selection of slower, tankier gravcycles don’t always feel more durable, and in my limited time with them often felt more like a liability than a force to be reckoned with.
While you’re chasing enemy hovercraft and dancing around oncoming fire, you’ll also need to issue commands to your ground units. This team features three or four robotic companions who range between balanced, assault rifle-wielding Warriors to heavy-duty Tanks that run headlong into the fight for melee attacks. Disintegration’s one-button contextual pinging system does an adequate job of intuitively issuing orders at a moment’s notice, but your tactical options are also extremely limited when compared to something like a traditional real-time tactics game. Telling all of them to focus on an enemy, move to a designated spot, or interact with an objective is pretty much the extent of your control outside of a few activatable abilities.
In the most hectic of matches, it can become overwhelming to trade fire in the sky while also giving effective directions to my ground squad. Keeping them safe rarely felt possible, as I was often too busy sparring directly with enemy pilots to get them behind cover. Their unique abilities, like tossing disorienting stun grenades or doing big damage in a large area with a mighty ground slam, are very useful against enemy crews, but they largely won’t affect their pilots. And since killing a pilot also kills their henchmen, it has so far felt like aiming for anything that isn’t the floaty, shooty thing in front of me is a waste of time and resources.
Before each match, you select a “crew” that dictates the stats and weapons of your cycle, the abilities of your squad, and your snazzy dress code. Gravcycle loadouts from crew to crew are satisfyingly diverse: putting on the pink and black leather of the Neon Dreams means you’ll be cruising through the arena with vehicle handling as sharp as your outfits, and its dual light machine guns and single-shot stun gun really spoke to me, as well. By contrast, the blue and orange King’s Guard are literal armored knights whose gravcycle features a charged bolt that is slow to fire but does big damage and slows enemies unfortunate enough to be hit by it.
I wish the aesthetics went beyond just color schemes and costumes, though. When you get into the action, all of the voice lines and sound effects are the same generic one-liners no matter who you’ve picked. Looking at The Sideshows, a crew full of killer clowns a la Twisted Metal’s Sweet Tooth, you would expect some fringe, Joker-fied quips to match, or maybe circus music to accompany their rapid-fire sticky grenades. Disintegration does the rest of a crew’s aesthetic so well that it’s disappointing and a bit jarring to see this part missing.
Of its three competitive game modes, I’ve thus far had the most fun with Retrieval. One team of attackers must grab explosive cores and take them to designated goals while defenders work to prevent that from happening. It’s the only time online where I felt incentivised to use my squad as more than just a ball of guns, as only they can carry the cores from point to point. Escorting them to the goal is properly tense, and the white-knuckle skirmishes that break out around core carriers is always engaging. Retrieval is similar in design to modes from several other online shooters, but the combination of first-person shooting and light RTS tactics really make it feel fresh here. This is the only mode that seems to fully embrace what makes Disintegration so unique.
In contrast, the other two modes, Zone Control and Collector, are your standard FPS fare. In Zone Control, ground teams must occupy a zone without enemy interference to contest it, but there’s no nuanced way to have your troops go in and secure those areas. Without being able to individually set certain troops in defensive positions based on their supposed strengths – for example, splitting more fragile units up behind different cover points to keep eyes on every approach angle – things often devolve into pinging your gang into a central killing zone and letting the AI figure it out while pilots hover in a circle shooting at each other. There could be deeper strategy still to learn here, but it doesn’t feel like I have the tools to enable anything more than an all-out brawl when fighting for a control point.
In Collector, there seems to be even less strategy, as killing enemies drops “Brain Cans” that need to be physically picked up by your squad to score points. More often than not, Collector games devolve into teams lining up, Revolutionary War-style, and firing into each other until one side breaks and runs. There’s almost no incentive to get creative outside attempting basic flanking maneuvers. I’m sure some of this brutishness is due to the community being young – time and experience often lead to techniques and play styles that will come to define a game. But so far Disintegration’s multiplayer doesn’t demand much of you outside of pulling the trigger.
Review in Progress Verdict
It may be too early to tell what kinds of clever tricks and strategies get teased out of Disintegration once it’s in the hands of a larger playerbase. But in its current form, this genre hybrid comes off as little more than a very interesting idea stuck in a very run-of-the-mill shooter. The mix of FPS and RTS never gels in a way where the inclusion of one fully justifies or elevates the other. Hovering gravcycles are fun to fly and shoot, but don’t spice up Disintegration’s otherwise uninspired game modes in any meaningful way. I still need to spend some time playing on its live, post-launch servers before I’m ready for a final decision, but right now Disintegration’s multiplayer isn’t much more than an amusing but thin curiosity.
No Man’s Sky will enable cross-play across every one of its available platforms from tomorrow, June 11. Tomorrow will also see the game join the Xbox Game Pass programme on Xbox One and Windows 10.
Announced in a press release, players playing the game through VR, PC, PS4, Xbox, Windows 10 or GoG will be able to connect online. The update is timed to coincide with the game being added to Game Pass, “to allow everyone in the community to benefit from the influx of new players that Game Pass brings.”
The Hello Games team has been working on the addition of cross-play for six months. According to head of publishing Tim Woodley, the developers have been “quietly reworking the networking back-end of the game to get all versions of the game onto one single multiplayer base.”
Aside from the benefit of being able to connect with previously unavailable friends on other platforms, this change means that the likes of huge planetary bases built on high-end PCs will now be available to visit for those on consoles.
This update will also add general improvements to the game, including speech-to-text, improved lobbies and fireteams, and a set of other tweaks to multiplayer, VR and the game as a whole.
Hello Games is teasing an “eventful summer” for No Man’s Sky, so it seems this isn’t the last update we’ll see in the near future. All of this is yet another step on the journey No Man’s Sky’s taken since launch, becoming one of the most notable gaming comeback stories of recent years.
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Joe Skrebels is IGN’s Executive Editor of News. Follow him on Twitter. Have a tip for us? Want to discuss a possible story? Please send an email to newstips@ign.com.
Robots blasting and bashing each other to bits is a concept near and dear to my heart, and on that level Disintegration’s single-player campaign delivers. Its creative approach to first-person shooting is also intriguing, since it has you floating above the action and calling the shots for a team of bots on the ground while firing away. But it’s not as smart as it looks, and what seemed like it could get interesting and tactical never really did.
Disintegration’s 15-hour campaign doesn’t do a great job of setting up the conflict between the evil, red-eyed robots and the good, blue-eyed rebels, but a lot of that history eventually comes out in between-mission dialogue with your cohorts. Most of them have been “integrated,” which is the technology of transferring a human consciousness into a robot body. As former celebrity pilot Romer Shoal, you lead your team in a series of missions to take down the enemy’s massive flying fortress. The voice acting does lend those bots some good diverse personalities, and that gives the story’s events a little bit of weight, at least.
There are a few “Wha?” moments from the opening minutes I have to call out: first, Romer knocks an evil robot unconscious by whacking him in the back of the head with a wrench. I… don’t think that’s how robots work? A short time later, 12-foot-tall robot hulk Doyle backs down from attempting to intimidate a human who points out Doyle’s gun isn’t loaded, as though Doyle couldn’t literally squish this guy between his robo-toes like jam. It settles down after that but these eyebrow-raising moments set a strange tone for the rest of the story.
[poilib element=”quoteBox” parameters=”excerpt=Your%20guns%20will%20tear%20apart%20the%20environment%20in%20a%20pretty%20dramatic%20fashion.”]Disintegration is respectable but not the prettiest of games – its robots are well-animated but the textures, lighting, and effects are largely middle-of-the-road – but it does have some good diversity to its settings. Visually at least, no two are alike: you’ll start out in forests and move to canyons and junkyards and urban areas and more. Mission design, on the other hand, almost universally leans heavily on throwing wave after wave of the same handful of enemy types at you as you move through a linear gauntlet. It’s not without variety in objectives, since you’ll often have to destroy a target or have your squad deactivate a jamming device so that you can use your gravcycle’s weapons again, but the process of fighting from point A to point B doesn’t shake up too much because of limited enemy diversity, especially in the first half.
To Disintegration’s credit, blasting enemy robots like Star Wars’ battle droids is a fair amount of fun for a while. Not because their AI is especially good or anything, but because rather than literally disintegrating when you kill them they explode into chunks in a satisfying way, sending pieces flying. That’s one thing Disintegration does better than most games: your guns will tear apart the environment in a pretty dramatic fashion, reducing wood to splinters and even shattering concrete barriers that enemies were using as cover. It’s not Red Faction or anything, since most of the environment is invulnerable, but this level of destructibility definitely makes the weapons and explosions feel powerful and look cool.
And yet, combat gets stale pretty quickly because even though this is a squad-based game where you get a bird’s eye view of the battlefield, Disintegration isn’t tactical at all. Where something like Mass Effect allows you to tell each unit where to go and what abilities to use when they get there, this is more like directing a mob. You can’t tell your Iron Giant-style hulk buddy to play Rock’em Sock’em Robots with the big guys while the more agile soldiers take on the fodder because there’s only one “everybody attack this target” or “open that box” button and they all act as one. It’s very simple and one-note.
[poilib element=”quoteBox” parameters=”excerpt=There%E2%80%99s%20only%20one%20%E2%80%9Ceverybody%20attack%20this%20target%E2%80%9D%20button%20%E2%80%93%20they%20all%20act%20as%20one.”]You do get to direct your squad members’ to individually use their special abilities, like grenades and ground-pounds, and they can be used as combos for extra damage. Missions’ side objectives will reward you, for example, if you can use the time-slowing bubble to hold enemies in place while Doyle bombards them with rockets. But these abilities aren’t really interesting to use because the positioning of your squad doesn’t matter much – there’s no setup required – so it’s just a matter of waiting for the cooldowns and then casting them again.
You have to keep your team alive to use them, though, and also so they can absorb all the enemy fire that your fragile flying gravcycle can’t. Depending on what gear you’re given for a mission, that can be tricky to do – for instance, if you don’t have any healing abilities and have to rely on pickups from certain enemy types or healing stations your crew can activate for you. But of course, if one of your bots goes down, all you have to do is retrieve their head and they’ll rocket back onto the field a few seconds later in a shiny new body, so you don’t need to sweat it much if they explode. It’s important to keep them on the field to give the bad guys something else to shoot at, and there’s a 30-second timer that will end the mission if you don’t retrieve a head, but the stakes are largely pretty low.
Then there are the boss battles, which look and sound great but are usually pretty weak. They boil down to shooting the giant four-legged Thunderhead walker (while dodging its slow-moving projectiles) until it goes down, then getting right up in its armpit – and I mean all the way up in its armpit – and hovering there while you hold down the fire button until each of four weak points explodes. It only got a little challenging when I had to deal with two at once, but the vast majority of these fights after the first one were painfully dull.
What’s especially frustrating about Disintegration’s campaign is that even though there’s a whole area you walk around between missions where you can talk to your crew, you have zero control over your squad composition or your vehicle’s loadout. Every mission dictates all of that to you, and all you get to do is pump in a few upgrade points for boring but necessary stat boosts to weapons, cooldown reductions, and things like that. I get that I’m being walked through different roles I’ll need to know for multiplayer, like the healer and the sniper, but it’s a bit annoying to have things like how you heal yourself change from level to level and not being able to pick a favorite gun or robot and develop it. That lack of continuity made levels feel like a string of unrelated battles, and practically kills replayability because I can’t return to a mission and play it with a different style of gravcycle and squad. Having no customization seems like a really poor design choice.
