For those who still do not know Raiders of the Broken Planet, this is a new episodic project created by the Spanish team Mercury Steam and primarily devoted to a multiplayer experience. The mechanics also proved to be immediately well balanced and enjoyable even in single, although the collaboration between players was still the fulcrum of the production. The chosen business model is also extremely user friendly, with a first episode offered for free and the others sold for the modest sum of € 9.90. Unfortunately, however, Raiders of the Broken Planet did not have the hoped for luck and even on PC, where cross-play with Xbox One users is available, finding an online match is not that easy.
Despite this, Mercury Steam held out and recently released a new episode titled Raiders of the Broken Planet: Hades Betrayal, penultimate among those planned and which adds other characters to the already large roster.
As in the previous ones, also in Raiders of the Broken Planet: Hades Betrayal we will find ourselves facing various missions in a team of up to four players, with the additional possibility of being invaded by a fifth user who will play the role of the villain. What do the missions consist of then? They often require you to defeat hordes of enemies, activate timed switches, defend positions, or execute kills of specific opponents. After two very convincing episodes, this third unfortunately begins to suffer some blows: the type of missions are variants, not too different, of what was seen previously and the change of map is not enough to guarantee the variety that would be needed instead.
The artificial intelligence is as always well done and helps to create fun and challenging situations, however the raids by the fifth player have not yet been adequately balanced so that in these cases the game over is always around the corner. And in single? In single person the situation can be considered similar, so much so that even at the lowest difficulty levels it is very difficult to reach the end of a mission. This is due to an incorrect balance of enemies and damage, so much so that frustration becomes a bit too recurring element during games.
From a technical standpoint, this new expansion, Raiders of the Broken Planet: Hades Betrayal, performs very well and indeed, it offers some truly inspired and well-crafted settings and characters. This is given not only by the excellent artistic direction, but also by the good proprietary graphics engine which performs well on high-end configurations but is also able to adapt to hardware that is not exactly recent. Audio sector, dubbing and various sound effects are then average, with some really spot on qualitative peaks.
This third episode, Raiders of the Broken Planet: Hades Betrayal, unfortunately does not fully convince: the missions in fact resemble a little too much to those present in the other episodes and the imbalance of the difficulty level during the single sessions certainly does not help to buffer the bleeding of online players. This is a real shame because Raiders of the Broken Planet is a project that generally works quite well since it has a business model that definitely meets users. Will the situation be resolved with the final act? We definitely hope so, good luck Mercury Steam!
Verdict: Recommended only for true enthusiasts
