Game Check: Scathe – Brutal Shooter from Trash Hell – News

Scathe sees itself as a fast-paced bullet-hell first-person shooter spectacle. The arsenal of weapons calls for action-packed battles, with plenty of boom and splatter. Located in a dark fantasy setting, the title makes a great visual impression. Plus a pounding metal soundtrack. What can possibly go wrong? After four hours I judge disappointed: almost everything, unfortunately.

You have to wipe the blood spatter off your visor regularly, otherwise the transparency will suffer.

Off to the maze

You take on the role of Scathe, the “Executor of the Legions of Hell” who receives a special assignment from his Divine Maker: you are to descend into Hell, find his brother and take his staff from him. It should be clear that the person you are looking for will not give you up voluntarily. As ordered, you make your way and mow all opponents over the heap.

In order to reach your goal, you traverse a labyrinthine game world that consists of many individual sections. Each area you enter has one or more exits. In this way you gradually develop and expand a map of Hell. In each section you kill several dozen enemies, collect runes along the way – some of them are hidden or in impassable places and to reach them you have to solve a switch puzzle – and extra lives. You will also find dark magic skills in some areas that you will use to support you from now on, and areas that you can only enter after completing a task.

Gradually you will discover the game world on this map. The goal is the four Hellstones that are dropped by bosses.

My best buddy, the Hellhammer

So that you don’t go into battle completely defenseless, the Divine Creator equips you with the Infernal Hammer at the beginning of the game. Your first weapon has infinite ammo, an inaccurate primary attack and also a powerful secondary attack: a kind of grenade launcher, but with a cooldown. A cool gun to get you started. Unfortunately, I only found another shooting club after more than two hours. At this point, the Höllenhammer and I had already had the first serious crises behind us.

Before that, I gained my first Dark Magic skill in an area: a self-healing ability. From then on, killing enemies granted me soul energy, which I was able to convert into life energy thanks to my ability. A very useful skill as I used to see the “Life Lost” screen quite often before. By the way, you have ten of them per run. If these are used up, you start a new attempt at the beginning of the current area. There are other magical abilities that you can switch between during battles, provided you discover them.

The Warlock was my first boss fight, and it was also the first time I felt a bit of a bullet hell vibe.

Not enough works in Scathe

Smashing my opponents with the Hellhammer for more than two hours was boring. When I finally owned a second weapon, it didn’t get any better: Due to the constant shortage of ammunition, I could only rarely use it – so I ended up with my buddy Höllenhammer again. In addition to not enough ammo in the levels, I also find the health pack distribution problematic. Either I can’t find any healing items, or I can find several in a very small space.

This leads to another gameplay problem: In the fights against the many opponents with different types of attacks, I was already mercilessly inferior on the normal level of difficulty in open fight. As a result, too often it was most effective to wait, protected as possible, for enemies to run into my gunfire. They often do me the favor too. The ammunition and healing item stinginess, the limited arsenal of weapons and the ambush requirement ultimately prevent fast-paced shooter gameplay almost completely. Or to put it another way: The balancing in Scathe is suboptimal in my opinion.

Other questionable elements are complete AI dropouts, a spongy jump control (which I need for collecting the runes or extra lives), the abstruse respawn mechanics in the levels, the cryptic progression system and the many deaths that made me wonder , whether I became the victim of a bug or whether this was intentional.

On the left index finger you can see my equipped skill, with it I can freeze opponents.

Conclusion

First of all: Scathe is not fun for me and I do not recommend the game in its current state. I did like the audiovisual experience with its great optics, threatening background noise and high gore factor in the first hour. There are also nice ideas, for example I have to wipe my blood-splattered visor regularly, the secrets are built in in a player-friendly way and many levels are varied.

For a long time, however, I’ve been totally bored by the one splatter animation for bursting enemies and the squeaky enemy noises from the off. The constant wiping of my visor and the imprecise jump controls are annoying. The absurd respawns of the opponents and the difficulty spikes unnecessarily stretch the game time. It’s a shame, but almost every element in Scathe strikes me as immature, unfinished, or poorly executed.

• First person shooter for PC
• Single player and co-op multiplayer
• For beginners, advanced and professionals
• Price: 22.99 euros on Steam
• In one sentence: Optically and visually successful, Scathe reveals clear weaknesses in gameplay.