RE-INVENTING THE WHEEL

NEED TO KNOW

WHAT IS IT?
A free-to-play PvPvE extraction shooter

EXPECT TO PAY
Free-to-play

DEVELOPER
YAGER

PUBLISHER
In-house

REVIEWED ON
Windows 10, Nvidia GeForce GTX-970, Intel i7-4790K, 16GB RAM

MULTIPLAYER
Yes

LINK
thecycle.game

A sub-genre has been brewing away amidst the tide of battle royales and hero shooters. The obtuse shorthand is PvPvE – which essentially means multiple players having to occupy and fight through a shared space full of baddies in the pursuit of competing goals. There aren’t a ton of these kinds of games, but they capture something of the potential for memorable stories that you’d get out of a DayZ, with the tighter structure of a competitive match. At their best they are an endless story generator, capitalising on the scope of possible interactions while applying pressure to have players make increasingly dangerous decisions.

enters into this fray as a free-to-play title, arguably making it more accessible than many of its peers. You’re a prospector, a gun for hire in a sci-fi setting with a Western twang, dropped from an orbital station