I was a little confused when looking up a little on the development team behind this game and I believe they’re called SHRAPNEL which ironically is the name of the game as well. They are composed of a bunch of talent with award-winning personnel behind their team and they have been working hard to make the latest in online extraction-based games. 

Some catastrophic events took place in 2038 when an asteroid collided with the moon, the following events formed a ring around the moon, which has ruined Earth as we know it and has now turned into a permanent evacuation zone. This area is no longer policed and is a no man’s land.

There is a special fragment that the asteroid created called Compound Sigma, and your main goal is to run around collecting as much Compound Sigma as possible and then make sure you extract it before you are killed. Compound Sigma is not the only thing you need to collect; you can collect firearms and ammo from other players when you drop them on the battlefield and also find these red bags that almost look like Santa sacks lying around the streets with assorted items in them that you can collect and extract with.

I was a little annoyed with the gameplay in this game as the main objective is to extract and not be killed. However, when I attempted to extract each time, I would get greeted with a beautiful crash making it hard to continue playing as the objective is to extract.

So I just ran around for as long as I could until I was killed just to be able to play the game without relaunching it. I was also concerned that I could see the implementation of blockchain and NFTs into the game. I imagine it would be for operators, weapon skins, and items. This is becoming more relative in the gaming community but has its time and place in games. 

It was clear the direction the developers wanted to go with the controls, but more polishing is needed before they are where they need to be. I loved the movement with the gun even with the ADS feeling like it needed to be slightly quicker, being able to lean and peak corners or get cover and peak was a great feature, but it needed polishing as it felt super clunky and like an afterthought. The movement generally could be a little more fluid as it felt like I was waking up from a sleep, and then running around a battleground. I would love to see some more animations added to remove the clunky feeling around the edges. 

There are not many games that make me want to take my headset off from the running noise but this game made it onto that list. The running noise got super annoying super quick and didn’t seem to change its sound regardless of the terrain you were on, so it sounded the same whether it was snow, concrete, dirt, or something else.

The gun sounds were not bad but, at the same time sounded a little generic compared to other games with firearms in them. I would love to see some updates in the game surrounding sounds so you could sneak up on someone and not hear them running two blocks away from your current location. 

I’ve never been so confused about graphics in games as I was with Shrapnel. There is currently one map you can traverse, which in some areas looked good, and in others, it looked like it was rendered straight off the Nintendo 64, which as much as I loved those days it’s not in the current generation of gaming. The developers did a great job with the map design and layout of everything, but it would have been nice to see more effort put into the textures to bring the game to life compared to others like it.

I was impressed with the realistic look of the guns and their skins but disappointed when set against the environment while traversing. I remember being super keen to check this game out from the images I saw online, only to be quickly reminded that images don’t mean anything. 

I can see the image of what the developers want to see this game achieve and I hope they get it there, but it needs lots of fine polishing to make it something that will drag an audience into the title. I’m not a huge fan of NFTs being brought into titles but that is also a personal preference and not something you need to have to enjoy playing a game. There is a growing market for extraction-based titles and I hope the developers can make this into something that competes.

Written by: Hayden Nelson