Going Deeper Underground With Sublevel Zero

With the very fabric of the universe being torn asunder, humanity is on its last legs. Clans and warlords spring up throughout what remains of the interstellar human empire, but whereas most seek to simply protect themselves, others look to reclaim the knowledge of the golden age of technology and try to restore the universe to what it once was.

You and your little space ship happen upon a mysterious looking facility that, almost as soon as you call for backup, drags you through a rift in space with no hope of return other than to head deeper and deeper into its tunnels and chambers to try and uncover the secrets within. It’s a good thing that your gunship is so manoeuvrable then.

This is a 6DOF – Six Degrees of Freedom – game, taking inspiration from classics such as Descent and Forsaken. In other words, you’re not bound by gravity to the floor, nor is your movement constrained by having a powerful engine at the back of your ship propelling you forwards, instead you have near total flexibility to move, pivot and spin along any axis. This is, of course, vitally important as you can be attacked by the facility’s security systems from almost any direction.

Though I previously had a go with a dream setup, with a VR headset strapped to my head and two joysticks in hand that gave me an awful lot of flexibility in control, things have necessarily been simplified for a controller, as you cannot twist the two analogue sticks like you can with a joystick. It still works very well and the movement is beautifully smooth, but it means that altering your ship’s yaw means moving your thumb to the D-pad. Thankfully rebinding options are planned for the final game so that this could rest on the controller’s shoulder buttons, but one positive is that you’re less likely to find yourself wondering which way is ‘up’.

As it is, those shoulder buttons let you switch between the two weapon slots assigned to each trigger, with guns on the right and missiles on the left. With the movement options available to me and the weapons at hand, combat was a fast and fluid dance of death. The security robots and turrets had various different attacks, from single sniper-like shots to flurries of gunfire followed by a mad charge in my direction. Though not particularly smart – allowing me to often use a doorway as a chokepoint and cover – the procedurally generated levels always threw unexpected challenges at me.

Sometimes I would just be too confident in my advance, other times I’d think I’d cleared a room only to discover I was still being hit from behind, or I was undone by some of the tighter corridors restricting my movement and ability to avoid damage. It’s quite brutally difficult, and while this is fitting for the Roguelike genre that Sublevel Zero places itself in, it’s something that is still being balanced throughout development. I felt like I was making some quite definite progress across several attempts, even if permadeath meant I was always being sent back to the very beginning of a freshly generated level and never got to see the second in this build.

I was, however, able to progress far enough to pick up some different weaponry from the enemies. Each kill would result in an explosion and floating debris to pick up, and this would occasionally include a new weapon. Homing missiles made a nice addition alongside the straightforward dumb rockets, but more interesting were the miniguns, pulsars and so on that were my main weaponry. The rate of fire in particular made a lot of difference to my mentality in attack, determining how long I’d need to stay in the line of fire. You can also start to combine weapons and craft items in order to upgrade your ship, and though I hadn’t progressed far enough to truly explore these options, I did learn that time does not halt while in menus, as this led to my untimely demise on one occasion.

What also helps to make Sublevel Zero stand out – you know, aside from tackling a genre that hasn’t had a high profile release in a very, very long time – is the quite lovely art style. It’s simplistic, that’s for sure, but the angular geometry works well to create the facility or craggy caves, and it fits well with the blocky and deliberately pixelated textures. Gunfire look like large pixels coming your way, with a little glowing trail behind each bullet, and the bloomy volumetric lighting caps off the atmosphere. The world map – which I often had to dive into to get my bearings – is also quite gorgeously styled.

There’s a lot to like in what Sigtrap Games are doing in Sublevel Zero, and it’s a smart blend of the classic 6DOF style of gameplay with that of the Roguelike, with all its procedurally generated levels, high difficulty level and permadeath. Yet it’s really the core gameplay which is king, and it’s the game’s tight controls, fluidity of motion and combat which are at the heart of Sigtraps attempts to reinvigorate a dormant genre.