First Look: Guns of Icarus Online
A crew lives or dies together, and I want more.
There’s something about airships that makes a person giddy. I’ve built a few and staged some airship combat on the Minecraft server I play on, so when Muse Games’ PR guy Joseph Lieberman got in touch about checking out their upcoming PvP airship game, Guns of Icarus Online, I happily agreed to take it for a spin with them.
The first thing that became immediately clear, playing through with Joseph and Muse Games CEO Howard Tsao, is that a ship is only as good as its crew. Crews are built from three classes: Captain, Engineer and Gunner, and every one of them matters.
Captain was the hardest to play well. It’s the captain’s job to spot the enemy, get the ship into attack range, and keep it angled so as many guns as possible can engage, all while not flying into a mountain, which kills everyone aboard. Joseph found that out the hard way during the beta. Engineer is the most hectic role, a constant scramble of putting out fires and patching the hull; a bad engineer loses you battles, a good one wins them. Gunner, the role I spent most of my time in, is the easiest to pick up but no less important. Knowing which gun to man, which ammo to load and which part of an enemy ship to hit is the difference between a kill and being scrap scattered across the ground below.
Gameplay is fast and furious no matter which class you pick. There’s something to do nearly every moment of a fight. I was constantly being sent to different gun emplacements by our captain, and when we were out of range or someone was hiding in the clouds, it was time to help the engineer with repairs. There is never a dull moment.
It’s still in beta, with animations and character skins yet to land, but even with pieces missing the game is genuinely beautiful, mountain peaks jutting through the clouds, enemy vessels coming apart under incendiary rounds. Muse are aiming for an August launch and only the PvP skirmish mode is in right now, but if it sells they’re hoping to add a full adventure mode. On the strength of this hands-on, I want to see them get there.
Whether the promised PvE adventure mode actually arrives, and whether the tight crew coordination that makes the skirmish mode sing holds up with random players instead of the developers.