I saw HYENAS in action during last year’s Gamescom, but this year I was able to play a session myself. Creative Assembly wanted to create a fast-paced team-based shooter that could become the next big thing and after playing it, I must admit there’s a lot of potential here.
Score some merch
In the game, you’ll play as a small squad of HYENAS, which are still human beings no worries. The HYENAS are a group of people that would like to stop capitalism. How do they do this? By raiding precious vaults filled with merchandise from Earth, straight out of the hands of Mars Billionaires. During my session, a cute Sonic plushie was the merchandise we were after. Since SEGA is publishing this game, you can expect a lot of those funny little Easter Eggs throughout the game. If you thought the Sonic merch was funny, wait until you see your crew blowing up doors with a SEGA Genesis bomb. Yes, the nostalgia will hit hard in this one.
Scoring merch from the vaults is your primary objective but it won’t be that easy. Since these vaults are property of Mars billionaires, they are willing to protect the goods with a lot of guards. Reaching the vaults will be challenging since you’ll have to fight a lot of enemies. Combining the power of your team is crucial here since some enemies won’t go down if you try to defeat them by yourself. Combining the skills of your team is key to survival but this is only one part of the challenge. The other one is staying ahead of the other HYENAS teams trying to score the same merch.
Work together as a team
Since it’s a team-based online game, working together as one is important if you want to stay alive. Taking out the regular enemies sounds easy but can become challenging if you don’t work together. Picking the right class and finding classes that work well together is part of the strategy. I went with an all-around character who had an assault rifle for some massive damage and a drone and stun grenades for the needed support. While I was taking out enemies, I used my drone and grenades to clear a way for my two team members so they could deliver some needed damage too. There’s a natural flow about it and it’s pretty impressive to see how well we performed as a team. The fast-paced action goes hand in hand with the tight controls and precision, it’s what you would expect but it plays surprisingly well.
If you want to compare it to another online shooter, Apex Legends comes to mind, but HYENAS really is a different kind of game nevertheless. It combines anti-gravity travel with power sliding and narrow corridors where you could easily get trapped if you’re not paying attention. During our match we also ran into another HYNAS team which is way more deadly and dangerous compared to the CPU enemies. We managed to take out the team but in the end gained second place because another team managed to escape with the merch. There’s a lot of layers in the gameplay and shooting down enemies won’t give you an automatic victory. You have to locate vault, break them, steal the loot, and escape as the only team. All while taking out enemies and other teams. It’s very impressive and it’s a type of game that I really could see become the next big online thing for sure.
Early conslusion:
HYENAS could easily become the next big online shooter. It’s not sure if it’s going to be a free-to-play game just yet but it certainly has some interesting ideas to gain a fanbase in no time.
