Published , by Ozzie Mejia
Published , by Ozzie Mejia
Most PC players have a favorite when it comes to tactical, objective-based shooters. There are those who like Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Siege, Rogue Company, Insurgency: Sandstorm, or even those who stick with Call of Duty and Battlefield. The team at Nexon Games, specifically the development team in Korea, is looking to put its stamp on the genre with a third-person team-based shooter called Veiled Experts. Shacknews recently had an opportunity to take a first look.
Veiled Experts is touted as a modernized take on the classic search-and-destroy multiplayer mode that sees teams plant and defuse bombs across different maps. Here, it's called Bomb Defusal and it's available to play along with several other traditional modes like Team Deathmatch and the free-for-all Showdown. The game features a handful of different agents with their own abilities and gadgets. Examples include Jack, who has all enemy locations revealed to him when he's the last player on his team standing, and the battle medic Kyle, who can revive teammates with full health.
It doesn't take long to see similarities to other established shooters. There's a shopping phase where players can purchase weapons, upgrades, sidearms, and gadgets, but some players will be happy to hear that any purchases remain in place until the end of the game. That's not necessarily true for gadgets, which stay in a player's inventory until they're used, but investing in a shotgun or a sniper rifle and knowing I can keep it until the game is over is handy.
Where Veiled Experts begins to differ is with pacing. Nexon likes to keep everyone active. That's why the game incorporates one key element from battle royale shooters, which involves moving the playable area across the map. In this case, it's a magnetic field. The magnetic field will occasionally move, sometimes forcing players to change their positions. This puts a lot of pressure on certain players by discouraging camping and other such methodical tactics.
While the magnetic field isn't as active in Bomb Defusal, there are occasions where pieces of the map will fall apart, changing up certain paths to the bomb. In one instance, the attacking team successful detonated the bomb, causing a giant chunk of a nearby building to collapse and affect the playable area for the subsequent rounds.
There wasn't a lot of time to get familiar with every character, but it becomes pretty clear that Nexon is working diligently to get Veiled Experts in a more playable state. A lot of the menus feature native Korean text and the game has yet to implement gamepad support. More importantly, there are some noticeable balance issues with several of the weapons and agent abilities. These are issues that Nexon will be watching closely as Veiled Experts heads into its final beta test, which is less than two weeks away.
While it's too early to tell how Veiled Experts will resonate with players compared to its contemporaries, there are enough interesting gimmicks here to make it worth a look. The final beta will launch on PC on Thursday, March 30 with the game set to officially launch later this year.
This preview is based on an early Steam build provided by the publisher.