Marauders is a game I must admit that slipped under my radar until I saw BigfryTV cover it on Youtube, where I immediately became interested in its development as the gameplay mechanics fit right in with the type of games I usually decide to spend my time with. Described as a ‘hardcore looter shooter’ Marauders is set in space in the 1990’s in an alternate timeline where the Great War never ended.

Quoting directly from the games devs “Earth has been industrialised to its breaking point, and many have fled to the stars. As space mercenaries known as ‘Marauders’, players will gear up and pilot their ships through hostile galactic reaches to salvage anything they can and survive by any means necessary. Throughout each match, players will be able to upgrade their gear on-the-fly as they uncover troves of loot from daring raids on hulking frigates and embark on tense touchdowns on moving asteroids. They’ll also have to keep a close watch for others looking to do the same and end their expedition with a bullet.”

Thanks to Small Impact Games & Team17, I was able to jump into the Alpha Test for Marauders that took place this past weekend. Jumping into the game it’s hard not to draw immediate comparisons to another game from the same genre ‘Escape From Tarkov’ though this is not a bad thing at all, from the inventory system through to the games menus the game definitely does have a ‘Tarkovy’ (I just made up a word) feel to it. The visuals of the game have a definite steampunk feel to them with the inside of spaceships looking like they are the internals of WW2 submarines. The basic gameplay loop sees you enter into a system either solo or in a group of friends and navigating yourself to a POI such as a space station or space ship and raiding the hell out of it in order to gather loot to either upgrade your equipment or sell to various vendors.

Your loot runs won’t go unopposed though as not only will you face a fairly bloodthirsty gang of NPCs that will try stop you on each run you will also face other players that are after the same thing as you are, loot! Bear in mind that it won’t only be on space stations that you will need to defend yourself as other players can actually turn your spaceship into a pile of space dust before you even reach your destination, I must say the space battles in the game really do add another dimension to the overall looter/shooter style of gameplay. The goal of raiding is to successfully dock with a POI, kill all opposition, loot all the things and then escape with everything safely aboard your space craft, if you die you lose everything you have in your inventory, including your current ship, the game will provide you with a standard ship for deployment if you do lose your current ship so there is no worry about being left without a ship.

I really enjoyed the few hours I spent with Marauders, the movement and shooting mechanics feel really smooth and overall the game feels very well optimized and thankfully didn’t set my aging GFX card on fire. One thing I must mention is that even though I love the games steam punk aesthetic is that most of the games environments feel rather drab and after a while every room and corridor starts to look the same, hopefully this is something Small Impact Games have earmarked for improvement as the game progresses through its life cycle. After getting a bit of a taste of the gameplay I am definitely looking forward to the games full release later this year, if you are a fan of Tarkov or looter/shooter games in general then I highly recommend you give this game a look and watch out for any public beta tests leading up to the release.

The game is planned to launch into early access, but there is no set date for it yet, you can add it to your wishlist on Steam now though, so you can be notified when it does get a date.