Beacon is a new sci-fi action rougelike game developed and published by ‘Monothetic‘. Beacon is said to be coming out on Xbox One in the last quarter of the year 2019, there hasn’t been given a set date though. Beacon is already out on PC the 27th of February 2019. Now this game has something interesting going on. Let’s take a look.
Now in the world of Beacon, players control Freja Akiyama who is a space privateer. She has a mission. Freja needs to find her crashed ship’s emergency distressed beacon. So it’s obvious that the player is stranded here as the ship crashed. When Freja came to and looked through the remains of the crashed ship, she finds what looks like her body. It is her body. Basically the ship also had a cloning bay. This means that when Freja dies she gets cloned and the clone continues on. This changes everything. A bit more on this later.
This world where you crashed on is an alien world and definitely a hostile one. So going around to find what you need is going to be problematic. You are armed though. You have your gun so you can fight back. In your journey you will find weapons and useful items. Not only that but here comes the interesting concept of Beacon that changes everything. Players will also be obtaining the DNA of fallen enemies. With their DNA, when you die, you get the chance to to apply their DNA to your own. This will give you physical mutations which off course gives you different stats, abilities and changes up the gameplay quite a bit. So every time you die, your nest run will be quite different.
This begs the question then, just how long have you been here? In Beacon, when you die a clone is made. Since you came to and found your dead body, that means you are a clone. Is that body the original body or just another clone. Does this cycle ever end? Either way this gameplay mechanic, where you can use enemies DNA to change yourself and get different abilities, is what’s going to make this game stand out. So how many different enemies are there, transformations can you take?
There’s a number of stuff going on in Beacon. There’s more than 75 different mutations. That’s good. There are unique weather types with storm events, so watch out for Tesla storms and polluted tornadoes. More than 75 weapons. 5 randomly generated levels so expect to go through a cryptic prison vault, a forest, swamp and more. More than 125 items and there are 4 item classes like one time use, passive, grenade mods and re-usable auxiliary. There’s over 50 enemies and 8 champion variants. There are different factions of enemies too like Native, Onyx, Prism, Solus and uncharted.
We checked out some Beacon gameplay. It does look cool. We really like what we see so far. We like the concept. We like that the different enemy factions will fight each other also which makes things more realistic and gives a better universe. We know there are huge boss fights like the excavation spider and the Solu hivemind. Variety is always good so the amount of enemies, weapons and mutations is very good. Definitely liking this. Beacon is fast paced too.
Overall Beacon does seem like a very good game. We definitely will need to see more gameplay but there’s enough information. The graphics are okay, we thought things would be sharper. Music and sounds are good though and we do like the environment designs of the levels. The developers ‘Monothetic’ have done a good job with this game. We at X35 Earthwalker look forward to when Beacon comes on to the Xbox one. Now Beacon may have clones and DNA mutation but what’s more real and pure is… the ‘Earth Walk!’
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