Headup Games announced that Elder Games’ Everreach: Project Eden is set to arrive on the Xbox One and PC this September, with a PS4 launch set to take place later in the year. The game was designed by just under 20 people, with five core team members headed up by Ede Tarsoly, and about a dozen freelance contributors.
The story was co-written by Michelle Clough, who worked on the Mass Effect trilogy as a narrative quality assurance specialist and game writer, while some of the art was headlined by Mai-Anh Tran who worked on Duncan Jones’ Warcraft and Justin Lin’s Star Trek Beyond. The press release also states that voice actor D.C. Douglas of Resident Evil fame is also contributing to the game.
The story centers around a security specialist named NoraHarwood, who is tasked with securing the planet Eden for colonization. However, as the process gets underway there are some mysterious incidents that take place that lead Harwood on a journey deep in the secrets of the planet, and into the discovery of a long lost civilization. You can get a glimpse of what the third-person, vehicular, action-oriented adventure game is like with the reveal trailer below.
The actual gameplay looks kind of finicky but functional.
Harwood also moves kind of stiff and doesn’t appear to have any hit-reaction animations, which makes the shootouts look kind of stilted and uninvolved.
A little more screen shake and maybe if she at least flinched from getting hit or fell down from big shots it would add a lot more weight to the impact of the shootouts.
The vehicular segments also look serviceable but unremarkable, and the enemy groupings give the impression that the AI doesn’t have a lot of functional breadth in its path-tracking and routine variety.
A lot of the commenters on the YouTube page pointed out that Nora looks a lot like Nova from StarCraft: Ghost and that her name is also very similar as well. After they pointed it out, it’s not hard to see the similarities.
Of course, I couldn’t care less about any kind of derivation from StarCraft, but I am concerned about whether the overall playability is janky, if the controls and vehicle handling is smooth, and whether the weapons feel properly tuned and impactful.
The hexagrid skill tree seems standard-fare, with buffs for damage output and defensive properties that expand across 80 different upgrades. The environments are just as serviceable as the rest of the graphics, so I don’t really have too many complaints there.
The main issue will be with whether or not Everreach is properly paced throughout its eight-hour campaign, if the gameplay has enough diverse loops to be fun for more than just an hour, and if it’s pozz-free. If it can nail all of those things then it might be a decent little budget-priced third-person shooter for home consoles and PC.
You can learn more about Evvereach: Project Eden ahead of its September launch on PC and Xbox One (with the PS4 version to follow later in the year) by visiting the official website.
