December 29, 2023 - Day 363 - NewPlay Bonus Review
Total NewPlays: 394
Game: Shatterline
Platform: Steam
Release Date: Sep 9, 2022
Installation Date: Oct 9, 2022
Unplayed: 446d (1y2m20d)
Playtime: 24m
Shatterline is a multiplayer F2P co-op PvE & PvP FPS with some roguelike & extraction shooter gameplay elements.
Launching a F2P FPS into early access in 2022 was a huge risk in an already flooded market.
Launching a F2P FPS in 2022 when your development headquarters are based in Kyiv, Ukraine? They don't make risk-management charts that big.
The premise is interesting, and the intro is well done. Even the initial PvE tutorial level is great. The gameplay is smooth, and the UI is polished.
However, the problem with F2P multiplayer shooters is that there are so many options available that a game has to present something that's utterly unique to rise above the crowd, and Shatterline doesn't quite deliver that.
In this case, that's less my judgement of the game, and more that Steamcharts shows that the average players has gone down consistently every month since launch averaging 285 players per day over the last 30 days.
No matter how good Shatterline's design and gameplay is, with a game that's primarily multiplayer, without the players, a game is pretty much doomed to failure.
Unfortunately, as interesting as Shatterline's backstory is, and as nice as the gameplay is, I suspect Shatterline may follow in footprints of The Cycle: Frontier before too long.
Shatterline is:
3: OK