Developed by Mad Head Games, Scars Above is a challenging sci-fi third-person shooter set on a mysterious alien world. Feel rewarded as you fight through and overcome the difficulties as you embark on a compelling and intricate story.

You play as Kate, an astronaut, and scientist working for the Sentient Contact Assessment and Response team, or SCAR for short, consisting of scientists and engineers sent to investigate a colossal and enigmatic alien structure that has appeared in Earth’s orbit. Humanity has named it The Metahedron. Things don’t go as planned and the Metahedron sends the team to a mysterious extrasolar planet across space. After waking up dazed and alone in a hostile environment, and with a strong determination to survive, you set out to find your crew and unravel the mystery behind what’s happened.

I don’t really want to use the term and genre of souls-like, but there are some similarities, and it’s quite possibly the easiest way to explain the general feel of Scars Above, given the challenging world to fight through, bosses to take down, and stamina management, and if you die, you’ll respawn at pillars. These pillars work as checkpoints, replenish health and ammo, and respawn enemies you had previously taken out. Along with all that, you’ll find yourself unlocking shortcuts just in case you die again, that way you won’t have to fight through everything all over.

With that being said, you actually have difficulty options to either make your journey a little bit easier or add that little bit more of a challenge. Modes include Rookie, Specialist, and Commander, with not a whole lot of difference between them. I only found slight differences in damage dealt and taken, so I played through Specialist and found it to be a decent challenge throughout.

Kate is not a soldier, but she’s resourceful and determined to do anything to survive. Using a combination of ranged weapons, devices, consumables, and melee, you need to manage stamina as you run, dodge, exploit weak points, and discover effective tactics to defeat your foes. As you progress through you’ll unlock more weapons and gadgets, each coming with its own unique ability to aid you in taking down your foes, and most of these are found through natural progression, though there are some hidden off the beaten track.

The weapons and gadgets have a great amount of variety between them, but I’ll stick to a few of the earlier unlocks to not give too much away. Your first gun is Vera, a rifle that discharges concentrated electrical energy. I found this to be my most used weapon throughout. Not long after Vera, you’ll get the Thermic Charger, which expels heated projectiles. My experience with this one was a little frustrating, as it would often bug out. I would charge it up straight after switching to it, only for it to not fire, instead showing that it needed to be charged up again. Each weapon you find will help you against specific enemies and potentially unlock shortcuts.

Gadgets and consumables are some other helpful tools. Consumables use fiber, which you can find throughout the world, and these are generally used to refill ammo, and health, remove status effects and restore battery for your gadgets. The gadgets use batteries, as mentioned above, which can be upgraded via your skill tree, and we’ll get to that soon, but gadgets are great for helping you survive. One of the first ones you’ll unlock is a protective barrier, allowing you to take a few extra hits before health damage is taken. Another is a gas grenade, which you have to combine with your Thermic Charger to ignite, and this leads to a nice area of effect damage.

Much like gear being unlocked as you play, you have access to a skill tree that gives you upgrades in the way you play. Spending the skill points you earn will grant you access to upgrades like more damage output, increased health, more gadget uses, and much more, but gaining these skill points isn’t as simple as killing things to get experience. As a matter of fact, this actually doesn’t give you any. You’ll gain points from scanning new enemies and finding knowledge cubes, which just like weapon upgrades, you’ll find more if you explore.

This mysterious planet is quite wondrous, scary, beautiful, and I guess you could say unworldly, filled with a good amount of different environments, such as marshlands, freezing wastelands, underground caverns, and alien facilities, and each has its own set of unique challenges, enemies, and secrets to uncover. I found that Scars Above offers a great depth of playability, particularly with the constant change in the world as you play. It certainly kept me gripped.

It’s packed with well-designed cutscenes, featuring a great cast of voice actors and a gripping story, however, going from seeing an amazing cutscene to seeing the character model in-game was a little underwhelming. I felt that the character model lost a few of its characteristics thanks to a mostly blank expression. It was almost plastic-looking at times. A little more work on blending the character would have been nice.

As I just mentioned, Scars Above had a great cast of voice actors. They delivered their lines perfectly and really pulled me in for the ride. Even the aliens each had their own unique sounds, and along with the whole ecosystem of the game sound design, the world felt alive with its ambient sound, and it was all tied in with a great soundtrack.

Scars Above is such a great experience with a challenging enough world and the option to make it that little harder if needed. Great sound design and an incredible voice cast all build up to a compelling and intricate story with plenty of twists. It’s just a shame the in-game models felt a little lacking.

Written by: MrVibeAU