Reclaiming Manchester In Beyond Flesh And Blood

Manchester in the far flung future of Beyond Flesh and Blood isn’t quite as grand and impressive a city as it is these days. The same can be said of most of the world though, after a global war for resources ravaged the Earth and sent the privileged few fleeing to an orbital colony on the UGR Astralis. Eighty years on and the United Global Remnant fancy that they might return to the surface as heroes, but things have changed quite a lot since the turn of the 23rd century.

There’s shades of Ender’s Game to the story, as your character, the young and promising Ethan Cunningham, flunks his Elite Pilot test for the use of the powerful prototype robot frame. From the player’s point of view, this ends up as a no-win situation, but the story tells us that this should have been eminently possible for Ethan to win and subsequently be assigned to remotely pilot the very best hardware.

Instead, you’re handed the keys to a dead end position piloting the Mk. 1 Tactical Combat Frame in a depot that the UGR have built up on the surface. After the horde mode combat simulation, it’s refreshing to see that the game has more to offer than just fighting, as you amble through the busy hub and onto what’s left of Manchester.

The Mk. 1 might be the least advanced of the four robots in the game, but it’s by the far the most heavily armoured, with a welding laser as its main offensive capability. It also features a rather curious design, with two large arms in proportion with the rest of its body, but then a pair of smaller arms inside these. It’s a very strange sight when you pick up another weapon with these arms and fire away.

The laser cannon comes into play during some of the game’s less combat oriented moments, as you explore the decrepit ruins of Manchester. You’re tasked with building new uplink stations that extend the reach of the network which lets you control your robot from up in space. Building these stations consists of making your way past the ruined obstacles in your way, solving minor puzzles along the way. You might, for example, use your laser cannon to remove an advertising sign that blocks a disused overhead metro system. With the metro now clear you use it to make your way past a large gap in the road, while other puzzles revolve around Watch Dogs-like CCTV camera jumping.

The Mk. 2 Engineering Frame does away with those slightly creepy little arms, and is faster and more agile with an upgraded laser cannon, but it’s the Mk. 2 Combat Frame variant that starts to bring the more combat oriented weaponry. However, these all feel fairly ponderous and slow in comparison to the Prototype Frame that you first took control of. That prototype is practically human in size and shape, it’s much more agile and manoeuvrable with even more advanced systems to allow it to still be able to pick up and hurl boxes and lamp posts at enemies, or indulge in some of the more gruesome and gory finishing moves. The Prototype can even clamber into another mech suit, which is just a gloriously silly idea.

The combat is fast and arcade-like, with enemies coming at you in waves from all angles. There’s no need to take cover, just keep running and strafing as all sorts of enemies attack. There’s the ancestors of those left behind on the planet, who are none too pleased to see you again, there’s large bugs that might remind you of those from Starship Troopers, and there might even be a more terrible, less terrestrial threat for you to deal with down the line.

If there’s one thing holding Beyond Flesh and Blood back, it’s in the production values at this point. Beyond simply being a rough around the edges pre-alpha build of the game, it touts Unreal Engine 4, but the visuals don’t live up to that statement of graphical intent. There’s also the storytelling, which will struggle to draw people in if the voice acting can’t bring the best out of the story and script. The story trailer above manages to be a bit creepy, thanks to the combination of a child’s voice with a music box rendition of Swan Lake, but we’ve been spoilt by modern narrative-led games and their nuance in this area.

That said, this is still a decent shooter and stomping around as a mech is inherently cool. There’s also the promise of co-op play and Pixelbomb are working to integrate VR into the game. The story does have Ethan sat with a VR headset on, peering into the world through the lens of a camera that follows the mech around, like the Lakitu cameraman in Mario 64. Strap a VR headset on and you’ll be making use of motion tracking to aim where you look, when the game launches some time toward the middle of this year.