Other Players Aren’t the Only Danger in The Cycle; Aliens Are There, Too

Prospecting is a treacherous gig in The Cycle. At the beginning of each match, you touch down onto the vibrantly unruly lands of Fortuna III, check your list of objectives, and make a tentative plan. You need to set up some Letium refineries, and on the way you might get an opportunity to hunt a couple of the rare creatures you’re supposed to collect samples from. There’s a dormant uplink relay to the northwest of the Letium deposits. That’ll be stop number two.

Of course, you’re aware it’s highly unlikely you’re going to get that far before the situation goes sideways. There are 19 other players roaming Fortuna III, each with their own goals in mind, and they’re bound to screw up your strategy. Some will steal your refineries away while you’re halfway across the map. Others won’t bother to sneak around; they’ll just start firing at you from across the plains. If the humans don’t get you, hostile wildlife might. There’s a good chance your journey from the Letium deposits to the uplink relay will be interrupted by an encounter with a pack of acid-spitting beasts.

Yager, the development studio behind The Cycle, call it a “competitive quest shooter,” and that’s an astute description. You’ve got a series of jobs to do in a world that’s trying to kill you, and winning a given match means finishing those jobs and getting off Fortuna III as quickly as possible. The competition is there to beat you to the punch, but that doesn’t always mean they’ll greet you with aggression. The Cycle provides room for both cooperation and combat. “On the whole, players might engage in more PvE than PvP,” Game Director Torkel Forner says, “but the knowledge that others are around, perhaps looking to fight, perhaps looking to help, spices things up quite a bit.”

This fluid relationship with your fellow players keeps The Cycle interesting from moment to moment. There are times when you and a few strangers, having converged on a single location, will have to turn your guns away from each other and fight off a wave of monstrous aliens. If you survive the conflict, it’s up to you whether to go right back to rumbling or not.

There’s also a formal alliance system called Pacts in which you can pair yourself with another player. “Friendly fire is turned off and you can see each other on the map,” Forner explains. You share resources, credits, and a score with your new ally, too. So you can work together and enjoy safety in numbers, but there’s exactly half as much glory in it for you. And when alliances outlive their usefulness, they can be dissolved. “If either player wants to leave the Pact,” Forner says, “they can do so with the press of a key, albeit with a slight delay.”

Outside of interacting with other competitors, you spend a match building up your level by completing objectives and turning aliens into pools of slime; after each match, the cards are shuffled. While increasing your level grants you temporary bonuses like faster health regeneration and greater weapon damage, but more crucially, it earns you credits which can then be spent on supply drops. If you need a rifle to take out enemies at a distance or stronger shields to soak up damage during an assault, these supply drops are a godsend. “How the players unlock their gear as the match goes on and how this is coupled with how the planet gets more and more dangerous is something that we feel is working quite well,” Forner says.

The Cycle is currently in the late alpha stage of development, so not all of its systems have been fully fleshed out. For instance, we’re told that the Factions feature, which determines what kind of gear players can acquire, will be used in the future to tell a broader story about Fortuna III and the forces that seek to exploit its resources.

But for the time being, The Cycle is already a frantically good time. You’re part miner, part mercenary, part friend, and part foe. You’ve got a plan that you know is probably going to fall apart. If you are interested, you can sign up to play The Cycle for free on PC, with new development versions available every Friday during game's public playtests.