Selaco describes itself as a first-person shooter inspired by 1993’s Doom and 2005’s F.E.A.R. But to be perfectly honest, I think that undersells it. This wildly ambitious retro FPS plays like a potted history of the genre’s golden age, melding all manner of ideas that emerged between the two key texts it cites as inspiration. The holistic worldbuilding of System Shock. The playful interactivity of Duke Nukem 3D. The crisp set-piece design of Half-Life. Selaco blends them all into a smooth, unctuous action experience. It’s already one of the best retro shooters out there, and the damn thing’s only a third finished.
SelacoPublisher: Altered Orbit StudiosDeveloper: Altered Orbit StudiosPlatform: Played on PCAvailability: Out now in Early Access on PC.
You play as Dawn, a Security Captain aboard the titular Selaco (which I think is pronounced Sell-a-co, but I habitually say Sil Acko because I am irredeemably northern). Selaco is a gargantuan space station designed to look, sound, and smell exactly like Earth in the year 2255, because actual Earth has been devastated by some unspecified cataclysm. Selaco is the primary home of the surviving human race, then, but now it has been struck with a disaster of its own, as it’s attacked by a force of purple-blooded supersoldiers.
None of this is clear at the game’s start, however, with Dawn awakening in the guts of Selaco’s Pathfinder Memorial hospital (following treatment for, amusingly, a pulled hamstring), which is already under heavy assault by heavily armed goons. The abrupt and somewhat unforgiving introduction sees you scrambling through the hospital’s corridors as they rattle with nearby explosions, dodging gunfire as your enemies hunt you down. After a minute or two of breathless evasion, you finally pick up a weapon, moments before the soldiers kick down the door of the room you’ve just crawled into.
From here, two things quickly become clear about Selaco. The first is that its combat is . The starting assault rifle kicks like a startled mule, spraying blazing yellow tracer bullets that rip up the environment, shattering glass, shredding boxes, and filling the air with concrete dust. Explosive weapons can rip whole chunks out of the level, leaving ragged, rebar-riddled holes in the geometry. Enemies are particularly squishy, losing arms, legs, and heads to sustained gunfire, or outright exploding in puffs of purplish goo. It stretches credulity that Selaco is built in GZDoom (a third-party sourceport of Doom’s original engine).