If you watch the Hyenas official announcement trailer from June, you probably won’t find too many reasons to get excited. None of it looks bad – a well-animated sequence of gunshots, nostalgia, and action – but that feels utterly par for the course when compared to the animated trailers we’ve seen for the likes of Apex Legends and Overwatch. Par for the course isn’t good enough in the modern shooter market, where even Call of Duty and Battlefield struggle to stay relevant.
The colorful pop-art aesthetic and cast of characters are going to be divisive, as they are in any game, but we’ve seen Hyenas in action, and it looks far more fluid and impressive once you’ve seen actual gameplay. Essentially what we have is a battle royale take on PayDay. Your team must loot an expensive space station of all its precious merch and escape with all of the goods while avoiding both NPC distractions and enemy teams.
The reason you’ve probably heard of Hyenas before is the fact that loot is made up of familiar retro gadgets and collectibles. Meta game designer Christoph Will explains the reasoning behind that to us in an interview at Gamescom: “We wanted to use something that was clearly valuable, but not diamonds or gold – that’s the obvious choice.
“We’re working with other partners, of course, but obviously, as a part of Sega, it was a natural fit,” Will tells GLHF. While watching Hyenas in action, a Mega Drive (Genesis in the US) is used in place of C4 to blow a door away, and yes, it somehow feels like a natural fit.
You can take the pacifist approach if you want, creeping around the environment while filling your bag with goodies, or you can take on enemy teams and wipe them out to make things easier for you. Once the central safe has been broken into, the team that escapes with the merch are the overall winners, though other teams can still get away with some loot and some kills.
It’s a simple enough concept, but it’s how Hyenas plays with things mechanically that makes things interesting. Characters have a variety of abilities and weapon types that are unique to them, which isn’t unusual in itself, but how about throwing zero-gravity into the mix? Certain chambers around the space station can have their gravity shut off, sending the environment and players flying around the room. It’s this mechanic that sets Hyenas apart from everything else.
“I think it’s hard to tell from videos, but once players put their hands on it in the alpha, they’ll see,” Will says. “I think we’ve really naile that experience. We have a core game that’s really good, and then we have Zero-G fighting and movements. You won’t get that in any other shooter. Prima Ballerina can turn Zero-G on and off for herself, but she also has movement boosts that other characters don’t have while in Zero-G, so she’s really mobile. This is to set the characters apart from one another.”
Hyenas still has a lot of convincing to do, but what we’ve seen so far is promising. Luckily we’ll be able to figure out exactly how Hyenas stacks up against other top-tier hero shooters if they get into the closed alpha test, which you can sign up for using the Hyenas website.
Written by Dave Aubrey on behalf of GLHF.
