Selaco Is a Retro FPS Mixing Old-School Doom Vibes With Modern Call of Duty Shooting – CNET

Selaco is a fast-paced retro first-person shooter, a veritable blast from the past. But in many ways, the game is also a glimpse into the future for so-called boomer shooters that bring the vibes of old-school games like Doom and Quake to the modern era. This Steam Early Access release — offering the first chapter of three planned for the final game — will likely shape the landscape of retro-inspired FPS games for years to come.

Created with the GZDoom engine, Selaco is cut from the same cloth as many other iconic shooter games from yesteryear. In gameplay and visual style, it’s essentially a cousin to games like Heretic, Hexen and Strife… and a second cousin to Doom itself. Even still, the Altered Orbit Studios team performed some techno-wizardry to create a consistent in-game world.

Selaco pays homage to a bevy of FPS greats spanning several decades: The plot is in many ways reminiscent of Half Life’s story; enemy behavior is just like what you’d see if you booted up FEAR; the tense atmosphere ratcheting up across the space station vaguely reminds me of Doom 3; and the weapons you have to work with (pistols, shotguns, plasma rifles, nail guns and more) are mostly cribbed from retro shooters.

The fusion of these disparate threads shouldn’t work. These first-person shooters feel too different to build one consistent experience that serves as a spiritual successor to all of them. But Selaco’s gunplay is satisfying, and its setting is unique and well-crafted to stand apart from those other shooters. Plus it’s got its own neat distinguishing feature: a wholly persistent world that maintains every area in the damaged state your running-and-gunning left it, making players feel like their actions matter from start to finish, something I’ve never seen at this scale with any other boomer shooter.

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Selaco must fall. The odds are stacked against you

Boomer shooters have always been fast-paced and tough as nails. One of the biggest draws of the genre is the power fantasy of getting good enough to wipe out hordes of baddies with speed and precision. You’re outnumbered and outgunned, but unafraid: In the typical boomer shooter, there’s no doubt that the player is the apex predator.

Selaco’s protagonist, Dawn Collins, isn’t at the top of the food chain. I played through the game on “Commander,” which was touted as the hard difficulty level. I figured, “Hey, that’s probably a good middle ground between medium and extreme, right?” That was a different time, when I was naive to the brutality unfolding aboard the space station.

Selaco’s surface is made up of sterile futuristic living spaces, while claustrophobic and gritty industrial pathways lie just beneath the ground. Your quest frequently takes you back and forth between these two connected worlds. Dawn’s arsenal and the enemy design almost feels ripped straight from Doom. It feels kind of trippy to see two-dimensional characters and weapons superimposed on a three-dimensional world. But you’ll still be able to nimbly move them and shoot them with responsive mouse-and-keyboard controls.

The alien threat overrunning the titular space station isn’t just massive, it’s also frighteningly coordinated. As soon as you’re spotted, your opponents will communicate with one another — something I expect in modern games but that comes as a surprise when playing in retro graphics. 

You’re surprisingly vulnerable. All it takes is a couple of shotgun shells or a handful of plasma rounds to shred through Dawn’s health and armor, so I quickly found myself adapting a slower approach to new areas.

I’d sneak around looking for health, armor and ammunition to help me survive if I made a mistake. Making sure to scan every corner of every room became my ritual. I ran through a list of questions: how many enemies did I see; what kinds of weapons are they holding; is there any table, chair or cabinet I can flip over for natural cover?

This is where that immersive sim DNA became more readily apparent. If you’re not willing to take it slow, dropping a couple landmines, placing a turret or two and playing a more intelligent shooter, you might want to lower the difficulty before starting your playthrough.

Kinetic, frenetic and fast-paced combat makes all the planning worthwhile

The lead-up to a big fight might be a slow and tactical affair, but once all hell breaks loose, Selaco’s gunfights are a no-holds-barred slugfest.

When the first shots ring out, they’re accompanied by bassy synth music that gets your pulse racing. This is it: It’s do or die, and it doesn’t take much for Dawn to get taken out of the fight. Selaco’s fast-paced gameplay can induce panic as you rush to squeeze off 30 rifle rounds at a bogey down a hallway before swapping to a revolver or shotgun to handle the enemy swiftly approaching your flank.

It’s a good thing the sound design is top notch — any time the enemies call out to each other forming strategies to take you on, you get some insight as to where they’re located as well. It’s also incredibly important to listen to enemy footsteps, but it gets easier to track them as they thud along the industrial walkways of the space station.

Enemy squads throughout the game will adapt different approaches on the fly. Some squads will bear down on you nonstop, charging you to their last soldier. Other squads will fan out across an area, taking potshots at you and occasionally sending a man to flank you while you’re distracted. In the middle of a gunfight, this all happens within the span of maybe 10 seconds, forcing you to shift between aggressive and defensive play styles by varying the opponents you face: You’ll never be quite sure what tactics a foe will employ until you’re in the thick of battle. 

Changing the world: How I made an impact on Selaco

The Selaco space station is a playground for you to influence. My Selaco and your Selaco are fundamentally different, because there’s no way we touched the world in the exact same ways: When a firefight trashes one area earlier in the game, it’ll stay damaged when you return later.

By the time I finished my playthrough, I’d flipped every gurney in the hospital and crushed every teddy bear in the toy store in the mall. I goaded every enemy to the front of the bank before taking them out in a fight. If I booted up the game right now and backtracked to those locations, nothing would be changed. Selaco features a persistent world, where everything stays the same as you last left it, which may be par for the course with modern AAA games but is a real feat for a smaller indie game running on the GZDoom engine.

I ended up thinking more about the weight of my actions. Do I really want to hide behind a barrel that might be destroyed in the next firefight? What if I need to stack that prop to reach a secret in the next room? Besides that, if I destroy something like an arcade machine while having a giggle, I’ll never be able to use it again on that save (as an achievement hunter, that simply won’t do).

All the little things in this world are what got me invested in saving it. Even if that meant I was going to get beat down time and time again.

Altered Orbit Studios is doing Early Access right

Selaco launches with a staggering 31 maps spread across six sprawling levels filled with secrets and Easter eggs for replayability. This version of the game, the Early Access launch, includes the full first chapter. It took me just about eight hours to beat.

Selaco is one of the most polished games I’ve ever seen tagged as an Early Access game. The enemies are sophisticated, the core gameplay systems are intact and functioning correctly, and I didn’t run into a single game-breaking bug during my playthrough.

While some games have rocky Early Access periods, Selaco seems to showcase why Early Access is important — the folks at Altered Orbit Studios are now able to receive financial support as they work on nearly tripling the size of their game. Development has been absolutely transparent and a roadmap is going to be made public soon. The studio hasn’t announced when more content is coming for the game, but like other Early Access games, buying it now will grant you access to the full game when it’s released.

“We have lofty goals for this game,” wrote lead developer Wesley de Waart in a Steam news announcement. “There are still many ideas we want to explore, systems we want to flesh out and game modes we want to add to make it even more replayable.”

I’m eager and ready to scrap my way through chapters 2 and 3 by any means necessary — and hopefully discover the truth behind the alien force invading humanity’s last bastion in the stars.

Selaco is available on Steam for $25. A 10% launch discount is available until June 14.

This post was originally published on Cnet