A2 Softworks is back again with their third title on Steam, Gatewalkers, a cooperative RPG where you travel to different worlds to save your own; a group called the Gatewalkers. The chosen few can go through the gate and come out on the other side to face what lies ahead.

A short cutscene explains what is going wrong with the world you live in and what you must do to save it, and you can immediately see that the graphics are going to have that more cartoonish feel to them. Once the video is done, you are thrown into the create a character screen where there is a limited selection, but once you are armored up, who cares about what hairstyle you are rocking? I would have liked to see some more options for different character builds so you can make them your own, rather than creating one from a template.

Like all good RPGs, the game is a top-down style with 3D models, so it feels like you are looking at more of an angle than you actually are. After being accepted into the Guild, you become a Gatewalker, and the main objective is to save your world from other worlds, and you do this by using a gate to teleport through and defeat the bosses. The quests I’ve completed so far have continued the storyline, but at the same time, you might not feel like you’re getting anywhere, and as soon as you finish one, another is waiting for you.

One of the things I liked the most with the gameplay was the skill tree you get to work. It’s not as simple as games that have you click on a skill to learn it; you actually have to work for it, and different weapon and armour options will point you down certain paths. There were a couple of different options with weapons, and these drastically changed how your skill tree would work, and as with any RPG, you can do everything from build a tank-like character to soak up all the damage, or sit back and let arrows fly with a ranged character.

I preferred using a war hammer, which, when you found the correct ingredients to craft the weapon back at the Guild HQ, you could upgrade the weapon from Tier 1 to Tier 2, and so forth. It’s the same with armour; you need to collect the correct ingredients to craft the items you need, and sometimes you need to upgrade the crafted items to make other things at the crafting benches. Depending on what you wanted to do was how you upgraded your equipment to how the tree upgraded.

I was surprised by how well this game played on the keyboard and how everything felt so smooth. Sometimes when playing RPGs sometimes you find the controls clunky and not working when pressed properly, but that was not the case with Gatewalkers. Button inputs were nice and responsive, which is great when button-mashing the keyboard. The mapping felt perfect for the style of the game, and like all good RPGs, you really need to stretch your fingers a little bit, but I didn’t feel like I was going from one side of the keyboard to the other.

There were a couple of bindings that I changed up, more or less just for personal preferences, but the default settings are more than comfortable. I was also able to re-map some of the biggest combinations to the buttons on the side of my mouse, leaving me surprised at how much control I had over the setup.

The co-op was so much smoother than I first expected, and we did not experience any lag whilst smashing out some quests. The first thing I noticed while playing with up to four friends was that the enemy scaled in difficulty, and this made for some nice fun. Unfortunately, though, the quests don’t seem to line up for every player, and having to constantly tell the person you are playing with the quest you are trying to complete and where they need to go became frustrating.

Topping this off, the story progressions isn’t shared between players, so if you have a consistent group of friends playing together, you’ll find yourself completing it several times over. I enjoyed playing solo more than anything, just for the fact that the scaling seemed insane for the level we were at whilst playing. Neither of us had good armour, or even decent weapons, but it felt like the enemies were grossly overpowered compared to playing alone.

There were occasions where you’d slap a boss with a critical hit, only to watch a single pixel fall from their health bar during co-op, whereas it’d take off a noticeable chunk in single-player. Needless to say, for a game that focuses mostly on cooperative play, I spent much more time playing as a solo.

The graphics have a bit of a cartoony feel to them with a hint of realism thrown in. It’s a bit of a mismatch of graphical styles, with cartoony environments and character models, but then extremely realistic water effects, for example, and the procedurally-generated worlds jump from fantasy environments to something more futuristic, like the inside space craft space.

The art team has pushed so much detail into the character models, and they’ve done an amazing job with creating effects that reflect the type of environment you’re questing in, with amazing weather effects and obvious toxic atmospheres, and the way the detailed plants interact with the player as they run through them only helps to deliver that realistic experience.

There was some really peaceful background music while roaming around doing the quests in the different locations, but the sound effects used while swinging and hitting the enemies were just the same swooshing sound over and over, so it was really repetitive. Other sounds, like taking a drink or eating some food, weren’t as frequent, but they were matched perfectly so that you knew exactly what your character was doing when pressing the hotkeys for the actions. One of the stand-out features is that they’ve used voice acting for the characters and prompts for the next quest, and this was something I was not expecting.

Gatewalkers is a fun time-filling game that will keep you amused for hours, with beautiful environments ranging from medieval castles to spaceships from the far future, a compelling story, and a skill tree that pushes the limits of how we see them. The fun gameplay and detailed character models are more than good enough to overlook the repetitive sound effects, and no two playthroughs ever need to be the same.

Written by: Hayden Nelson