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2020/04

Sorrow Trailer Teases Sci-Fi First-Person Shooting, Exploration

JOMM! Just One More Minute released a new video teaser for their alpha project, Sorrow. The trailer gives gamers a very brief glimpse of the Unreal Engine 4-powered sci-fi shooter that’s due out for PC.

The game feels like a throwback to classics like System Shock and Deus Ex, with hint of Perfect Dark and a small smattering of the long forgotten N64 shooter Armorines, which came out at a time where video games were attempting to emulate the action of Starship Trooper, such as Jet Force Gemini and Microsoft’s criminally underrated Outwars. But I digress.

The main gist of Sorrow is that it’s set in a futuristic environment where you collect powerful weapons, take on a mysterious enemy, and solve environmental puzzles, ala Half-Life.

You can get a very quick glimpse of the gameplay below.

I really have no idea what’s going on, other than that the weapons all look like retro-fi depictions of old-school sci-fi films thought futuristic laser rifles would look like, and it appears you fight some black-clad villains and some giant robots.

Majority of the environments look like labs, futuristic office buildings and robot factories, which could be cool if they’re varied and unique enough with some destructible elements.

There’s a lot of environmental scrumming going on, and it looks like a strong focus on adventuring.

Previous to that game trailer there was a tutorial video that gave you just the very basics of what the movement and shooting mechanics are like.

If I did have a criticism of the game’s visual design specifications at the moment it would be that the color scheme is too drab and dark, and they need to rework the lighting system.

I’m not saying everything has to be rainbow colored and bright, but they do need to make sure that you can very well identify enemies from the background, and that they don’t have color bleed between environmental entities and interactive objects.

Since it’s running on the Unreal Engine 4, they should use the filter to raise the brightness level of the material layer’s hue and then increase the specular maps on metals and plastics so the environment pops a little bit more due to the contrast.

The game is still in early alpha, though, so there’s plenty of time to fix up the shaders to give it a nice, unique look and it’s own visual identity. In some ways there are hints of EA’s Syndicate reboot in there, they just need to fish out a bit more of the game’s graphical personality to make Sorrow shine.

There’s currently no release date set for the game, just a couple of videos present so far. If it progresses in the right direction it might be worth keeping an eye on.

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