Project Ethos is a new free-to-play third-person hero extraction shooter with roguelike elements. The main game of Project Ethos is an extraction mode. And while I was excited to finally see 31st Union’s first project since its founding in 2019, I couldn’t help but feel that many of the mechanics felt like they belonged in games of that year.
The point is: Project Ethos is fine as a game. It hits all the right notes as a third-person extraction hero shooter, but my first impression after a few hours of hands-on time is that it doesn’t seem to stick to anything truly genre-defying in either the roguelike or extraction shooter. departments. In the preview I was able to play six different heroes, each, as you would expect, with their own skills and weapons.
This forces players to really get comfortable with that character’s skills as secondary skills, as skills in a hero shooter are meant to enhance your playstyle. Your gunfight comes first. And Project Ethos has some fun weapon sets that I enjoyed playing with. The learning curve with characters and skills was fairly low, so new players won’t feel too out of water when entering Project Ethos.
The Trials mode is PvPvE, which means you play against real players, as well as NPC enemies that appear on the map. The matches you queue for are permanent, meaning that every time you join a game, other players have been playing in that match for quite some time. Every time you queue, you can see how much time is left in the match.
On persistent matches, this means that when you get into a game, you may end up getting closer to some enemies running around the map. This also means that you will encounter players who are at a higher level than you. Each Trials match has its own leveling system. You earn XP by collecting XP shards from various loot bins you encounter, killing enemies, and completing events that trigger randomly around the map.
The events that could appear on the map were a bit confusing at first glance. It was difficult to see where some events took place just by looking at the general map. You really have to look in your immediate area to find the local event and then activate it. After a few rounds of play I got used to this method, but it was frustrating not to see the small events on the map.
When you level up in a match, you can choose one of three different power-ups for your character. There is a collection of 27 different power-ups to build your playstyle. And this is where the roguelike element comes into play. If you choose to stay in the game for that long and at the same level, you can earn up to nine different power-ups in one extraction run.
The random events that appear on the map include various activities that unlock a large loot chest with bigger XP boosts, weapon improvements, and cores. Cores are the big items you’ll want to collect on every run, as extracting them with cores allows you to purchase augments in the main hub. These increase the ability to get power-ups faster, give you health drops from the NPC bots you fight in the game, and other bonuses.
None of these improvements increase your damage to other players, though, so it’s pretty balanced in that regard. Trials generally felt fairly balanced in gameplay, as you could decide to withdraw from battles if things felt too risky. It felt like a real survival experience with the typical extraction shooters. While you could feel the imbalance of the characters’ weapons, with one having higher dps than the other, you still had the option to escape to compensate for that problem.
In the second game mode I was able to play, called Gauntlet, there was no escape. You are put into a 3v3v3v3 match where you play against another team in a small arena. The first team to get 3 wins wins. You’ll be in a server full of other teams, as who you encounter will change each time in a Dutch round robin format.
In this format, the bottom half of the teams compete against the top half of the teams: team 1 faces team 5, team 2 faces team 6. According to the definition of the Dutch round robin, you are not allowed to face more than twice stand a team. Anyway, this format was the only one that worked for this game mode.
Gauntlet really showed off the imbalance of character skills and weapons, as you’re forced to face your opponents head-on with very little room to maneuver. The sniper character, Prism, is incredibly strong, and her primary beam weapon quickly melts opponents at close range, and her sniper rifle allows her to deal devastating damage from a distance. Combining that with her E ability, where she casts a prism field that increases damage, makes her an incredibly difficult character to beat in Gauntlet.
In Gauntlet you still have the roguelike element of having to choose from selections of your power-ups. This further demonstrated the imbalance of character damage and powers. I did like the competitive aspect of Gauntlet over Trials, though. It showed a lot of promise of what competitive play could feel like in Project Ethos.
The gameplay loop of Trials and Gauntlet is very funny and not exciting. These are not experiences that you cannot get elsewhere and that you have invested all your time in. Fortnite came to mind when I was playing Project Ethos, and I found myself comparing some of the mechanics in Fortnite that Project Ethos could have. benefit enormously from it.
Overall, I really enjoyed my time with Project Ethos, but ultimately I was left disappointed with the game as a whole so far. Project Ethos ultimately plays well, is enjoyable, and uses the extraction and roguelike aspects to its advantage, but on the surface it fails as a novel experience that players will want to experience again and again.
