The game is powered by the Unreal engine, which I always consider a plus for shooter games. Between that, and the look of the intro cinematic (before things started moving at 20 frames per hour) had me in good spirits, until the last scene of the cinematic. Some woman gets dropped into a room, only to be fed, screaming, to some sort of thing kept conveniently out of sight of the camera, as if we aren't supposed to be able assume it is a giant face-raping abomination of science. Her face, however, suggests someone is instead having her watch a rather dull movie. I have never seen anyone so disinterested in their own disembowelment than this woman seemed to be. There was screaming, but her face was a complete deadpan. After that, I went straight to the single-player campaign, and I was given a choice between four different playable characters. There was Stonewall, your cliché ex-soldier who was dishonorably discharged and fights as a mercenary to prove his innocence, and as droll as that sounds he actually seems to be the character with the most depth. Theres also Amp, the un-ironically named adrenaline and danger junkie, Mass, the un-ironically named heavy-class character, and Shade, the un-ironically named... stealth guy I'm going to assume because it isn't really obvious. Like Stonewall, they all have their reasons for fighting; Amp because something about a cure for her addiction because rehab is apparently too simple an option, Mass' reason for fighting is a vague "he wants it to go well" which might as well be the game announcing with a megaphone "hey, this guy has a big secret that is going to be a major plot twist," and Shade, who, and I'm being honest here, suffered a "terrible loss" and has dedicated his life to revenge, leaving a "trail of corpses." I decided to play the obvious choice, Mr. Trail-of-Corpses, Shade. While the campaign loaded, I was greeted with the always re-assuring message telling me that, since this is the demo, I would be playing from a few various, disjointed points in the game, so the story will have no flow. 'Well shit' i thought to myself. Why couldn't they just take a small chunk of the game to make the demo, or even something separate from the real game's campaign all together? I know I'm playing a demo and can't expect the same story-telling as I would from a full game, but what they've essentially said is "we're gonna stick you in a few levels, just wander a bit and shoot back at whatever comes your way and looks kinda mean." And I do mean "stick you in" because, after the loading was done, I was at the beginning of a level. No instruction of any kind, just me and my squad of AIs standing around, waiting for one of us to pretend we knew what the hell we were doing. Then i started to move towards a door and my camera had a seizure because one of the AIs had the sheer audacity to walk next to me. A few more steps and we started to get shot at, and it was then that I noticed that I had no cross-hairs at my disposal, so I put what appeared to be some sort of poorly-rendered human-esque shape near the middle of my screen and held left click until it stopped shooting. I then opened up the menu and took note of the control scheme, and noticed that you can't jump in this game. Now, it may be just me on this, but I feel we've come a bit too far technologically with games to leave out jumping. It doesn't matter to me how attractive looking that one-foot block is if I can't jump the fuck over the block. Also it turns out you do get cross-hairs, but only as long as you hold down the button for iron-sights, which you basically have to do in every firefight unless you want to shoot with the accuracy of a Parkinson's sufferer. To make use of the squad system, and to give your brain-dead squad a reason to exist, The Scourge Project features a revive system because that hasn't been done to death. Whenever you run out of health (and I honestly still cannot tell you where the health bar is, or even if one exists) you lower your gun and take a knee, and the enemies stop shooting at you because they totally get that you need a moment to catch your breath and they can respect that. Once that happens you'll get a timer indicating how much time you have left to be revived before you simple keel over and die, and during this time one of your mates will come revive you. I have to give the AIs credit on this one, they'd risk life and limb to revive me, maybe because they were aware that, of the four of us, I had the one braincell we were forced to share. The level only ever ended from death one time, and that's because while I was taking a knee all my other squad-mates decided that they'd taken their fair share of too many bullets and they took a knee to, and that was that. There is also a sort of XP leveling system in the full game, because I kept getting notices on my HUD that I had gained either +1 XP in "Assault" or +1 XP in "Weapons". Now "assault" I get, but getting experience points for weapons in a shooter seems a bit like getting experience points for breathing. The game also features "character unique flashbacks" which, at least for Shade, consisted of a short black and white clip of a guy in a general's uniform telling me my sister was alive for now, and to focus on the mission. Now, mentally, I was able to make the connect "hey, that guy who looks like a dick has my sister, and I also 'experienced a great loss' I bet they kill her" and then I realized it was probably because instead of focusing on the mission like Mr. Black-and-White said, I was having flashbacks. At the end of each level, Scourge Project gives a score tally of kills, deaths, revives, damage dealt, and damaged taken, which is a good feature if you're playing campaign co-op with a group of competitive pricks, but, playing solo with AIs as my teammates, I didn't really feel it overly necessary to show that I out-played a team with a collective IQ of broccoli.
As the demo progressed, I was faced with not only human enemies but small little spidery shits that swarmed and were generally annoying, and then later a group of much larger shits that very much liked to jump around. At the end of the third level, there was a cinematic which involved my squad being trapped waiting for an extraction, and then a really large shit jumping out of a wall presumably to separate us from our internal organs. "oh golly gee wilikers a boss fight! finally something both exciting and big enough to render well enough for me to shoot it accurately!" and then the demo ended. I must admit, I was surprised. I had given The Scourge Project my time, and all it gave me in return was, well, nothing special, really. Maybe it ended there because they hoped that people would buy the game just to fight the boss, because other than that the demo really didn't make the game any more enticing than it had been before I played the demo. The ending says I should "buy the full game for unlimited access to all-out, adrenalin-pumping singleplayer, co-op and multiplayer action" and I have to wonder if the full game is actually some completely different game from the demo, because the demo had none of those qualities.
tl;dr:
Gameplay: 5/10
Presentation: 7/10
Graphics: **/10
Sound: 7/10
Overall: 6.33/10
Presentation: 7/10
Graphics: **/10
Sound: 7/10
Overall: 6.33/10
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