Spectre Divide, a new indie tactical FPS game, looks to make a splash in the competitive FPS scene with its unique mechanics! Read on to learn our first impressions about the gameplay and how it differs from the other tac-shooters in the market!
Spectre Divide: A F2P Indie Competitive Tactical FPS Announced
With the market for competitive tactical shooters dominated by games like Valorant and CS2, Mountaintop Studios is developing a new tactical FPS that looks to shake up the scene. Enter Spectre Divide, a 3v3 competitive tactical shooter with its unique comic book art style that’s classic anime-inspired cel-shaded visuals and new gameplay mechanics to revolutionize already established tac-shooter fundamentals. Spectre Divide is an indie FPS game that looks to make a big splash in a genre that’s persisted for ages.
Spectre Divide Overview and Features
⚫︎ Round-based two-site defusal core mode with a first-to-8 format
⚫︎ Anime-inspired and classic cel-shaded visuals
⚫︎ 8 “Sponsors” or class loadouts to choose from and 20 usable weapons
⚫︎ 4 Maps to learn with Casual, Ranked, and Custom Game modes
⚫︎ Create your own duo and personalize their appearance with various cosmetics
⚫︎ Guild system that encourages community engagement and weekly competitions
⚫︎ Free-to-Play model with microtransactions for character and weapon skins
Comic-Like Visuals and Setting
First off, let's talk about the game's setting and visuals. The game is set in the fictional futuristic city of Breakwater, where people compete in the “Santai” for glory, status, and achievements. Your goal, along with your Spectre, is to be the number one competitor in all of Breakwater, where you will dominate the rest of the competitors in the Santai.
The game's graphics are definitely unique, as the main inspirations for the visuals are anime and the older 90's cel-shaded visuals. The main intention is to enhance readability and contrast, especially with the map layouts being quite large. You will be able to personalize your own characters, outfitting them with various cosmetics to show off your characters' appearances. Not only that, but there are also weapon skins that are in the game to choose from. While these were still limited in the playtest, the game will follow a free-to-play model with microtransactions that are strictly cosmetic.
Duality: Three Players, Six Bodies
Spectre Divide’s unique mechanic that separates it from other shooters is the Duality mechanic. Duality allows each player to control two bodies, in this case their main body and their spectre, in a match. This means that while the game is 3v3, each player has two lives in a round, technically making it a 6v6 tac-shooter. With the use of the universal Duality Puck, you can move your second body around the map at will, limited only by the puck’s throw range. Keep in mind, however, that the time it takes to move your second body depends on the distance between its previous location, so the farther the body is before you relocate it, the longer it takes to arrive at that spot.
This allows for unique interactions in-game, like the ability to cover multiple angles by yourself, trading your own in aim duels, and even letting you defend multiple sites at once. This makes the game way different from the current tac-shooters on the market because it changes how players will play different angles and aim duels in general. Duality is integrated into every aspect of the game, like economy management, gun loadouts, utility, map design, and more, to create a more dynamic tac-shooter never seen before.
Sponsors: Utility and Equipment Loadouts
Similar to Valorant, the game sports a role-based utility loadout. Each player will choose a “Sponsor” which is the game’s fancy term for choosing your own utility loadout, which is similar to choosing a role and playstyle. There are four available options before starting a match, each with their own specialty. Some examples are Pinnacle International and its kit of having both a frag and flash grenade and personal healing.
This loadout would be akin to an entry fragger-type role where you could use the frag grenade to get people out of certain positions and snuff them, use the healing stim to heal or buff you and your spectres before and after a gunfight, and use the flash to clear entry points. Similar to other tac-shooters, learning utility lineups will also be vital in playing the game at a higher level. Lastly, there are no ultimates in the game, since they want to base the utility around the game’s gunplay. Speaking of which…
Gunplay and Movement
Spectre Divide is a tac-shooter, and though it may have elements that are inspired by other shooters across the FPS genre, it’s undeniable that the game takes most of its beats from other tac-shooters. Of course, the game does a lot of things differently with regards to a lot of its gameplay mechanics, one of which is the gunplay.
Similar to the aforementioned games, the gunplay functions similarly to both but has notable differences with regards to recoil, spray patterns, and most especially having the ability to aim down sights (ADS). The devs have specifically stated that the spray patterns differ depending on if you’re aiming down sights, where the spray pattern is deterministic when you shoot in ADS and random when hip-firing.
This means that you’re more accurate in most scenarios when using ADS, and while you can still shoot from the hip, it might change how players consider how to hold angles and take aim duels. Most importantly, the game allows you to shoot on the move with accuracy using ADS, which is completely different from most tac-shooters.
In terms of movement, its a traditional tac-shooter where you can’t sprint or lean and is restricted to the normal pace and walking. However, the game allows you to vault over certain obstacles, which opens up different angles in different places.
In addition to this, the Duality Puck changes the way you move around the map. The game’s map design is designed to have certain areas only accessible by throwing the puck, which adds more angles for you to be worried about during retakes, pushes, and more.
Economy Management
Traditional economy management exists in the game. You and your team make decisions to buy and save on certain rounds. The main difference in the economy is that buying guns in the game is a package, where the main body and the spectre get two different weapons. One example is that buying the game’s equivalent to the AWP would mean that your main body would have the AWP and your spectre would have a completely different gun.
The devs have stated that this is intentional and vital in balancing the game’s economy system, as the loadouts are intentionally split between a general-use weapon and a specific weapon. In addition to the economy, the game length is shorter than most. One way the devs influence the economy in shorter games is that income increases depending on what round it is in the half. There are still loss bonuses, bomb plant bonuses, and other traditional rewards like kills, but the passive income system is different than most tac-shooters.
Potential Tac-Shooter Revolution
Some of us at Game8 were fortunate enough to be invited to their exclusive playtest, where we could experience the game firsthand. The game’s tutorial is concise and teaches the basics of shooting, moving, and how to interact with your second body using the Duality Puck. Admittedly, it feels like a missed opportunity to have something like Valorant’s tutorial, where it actually puts you in an attacker or defender scenario. This could still be the case in the game’s actual release, so hopefully that gets added.
While some of us were on separate teams, a couple of us were fortunate enough to be able to team up with the game director himself, Lee Horn, where he was definitely taking the lead and even letting us come up with our own solutions while guiding us on some more advanced tactics. After playing a few games, the gunplay and movement in general are like a combination of a lot of shooters, which is what they advertised the game to be like in the first place.
The ADS and shooting mechanics were something to get used to; being able to shoot accurately while moving (albeit slowly) is a big difference since CS2 and Valorant would have you shooting mostly from the hip and crosshair placement. So in essence, it’s like playing a tac-shooter like Valorant, but you would be using the ADS a lot more, mainly because of the accuracy and spray pattern.
Getting used to having two lives is something different, especially with the constant need to make decisions about moving your spectre elsewhere. While it isn’t exactly hard to move the spectre, making the decision to move your spectre constantly changes the way we thought about trying to move around the map. One example is moving the spectre in aggressive positions to gather information on footsteps by using the Spectre Warning notification to warn you of opponents that are close by.
The utility in the game has a lot of variety, and they definitely wanted the roles to be specialized in certain areas. As explained earlier in the Utility section, you are able to pick four different loadouts that fulfill different roles at the start of the game. The other loadouts can be unlocked by finishing the game’s weekly and daily quests, similar to Valorant’s design for unlocking agents.
Most of my time playing Spectre Divide was spent using the Morrgen United loadout, which specialized in area denial. One of its items was a smoke grenade that has the secondary effect of shifting your spectre in its smoke area, and the enemies will not be able to see the spectre being relocated in it.
This was a great information gathering tool as well as a great defensive tool, mainly because you could use the Spectre Warning to notify you of opponents that are running near the area you smoked out. On the other hand, it also opens up for more aggressive plays where you could use the spectre to peek out of the smoke and catch enemies unaware. Since the game doesn’t have ultimates, the area denial in the game isn’t overly complicated. As opposed to Valorant’s tide-turning ultimates when used at the correct time, which is what we prefer to look for in tac-shooters.
In terms of the game's visuals, some of us also noted that the game's colors seem washed-out and that the enemy highlights were a little hard to see, hopefully it's something that could be changed in the future. There were a lot of instances where some of us were fooled by our own teammates as their audible footsteps led us to look in the wrong way. There's also a problem of not having a visual indicator if the object can be shot through, as there was one instance that a teammate of mine's spectre was just spammed through where he hid his second body.
However, the customization feature is actually pretty nice, and offers quite a lot of variety. There was a big focus in personalizing your duo of characters and it's definitely appreciated. Hopefully there won't be issues with visual clarity with certain color schemes, since the game does have different color options for several of the cosmetics that you can equip.
Ultimately, it’s a game with tons of potential, and clearly, the mechanics are grounded and based on the devs’ love for shooters in general. While the game is fully independent, it has a lot of potential to create a splash in the competitive FPS space. With investments made by several content creators in the FPS space and, more importantly, the involvement of former pro player Michael "shroud" Grzesiek in the development, it’s safe to say that the game will be centered around high-level competitive play in the genre.
The game is still in its Alpha stage and there will be a lot of changes in the near future, but the foundation of the game is already a good sign of things to come.
