Haven Studios’ latest playtest of a pre-alpha version of Fairgames continues to ‘find the fun’, according to sources familiar.
Last week, Haven Studios ran another playtest under the codename ‘espresso’ for Fairgames, but according to those involved, the game is still struggling to find its fun factor and still has a long way to go in development.
As mentioned in a previous report, the gamemode played was called ‘Cargo Heist’, which is essentially an extraction-based experience where you load into a map, loot, break vaults, and then extract – I suppose the only unique thing here is that there’s also respawns, which takes away from the high-stakes nature of an extraction-shooter.
Gameplay sent to Insider Gaming, on the condition that it not be made public, shows four three-player teams looting a giant mansion using a class-based system. The game somewhat resembles The Division or Call of Duty in its graphical style and movement, with elements of grappling and wall-running, but the reveal trailer’s overly colorful look seems to have been toned down significantly, adopting a more grounded color palette.
Fairgames is Struggling
Screenshots of the game’s playtest Discord showed a massive amount of negative player feedback, with players criticizing game-defining features like movement, NPC’s, the class system, and more.
Others who played the game tell Insider Gaming that they either played a few games and stopped, or teammates would leave mid-match and not play again because the game felt incomplete or boring.
It seems that, at the very least, Fairgames still has a long way to go in development, and while I never want to write off a game before playing it, I do genuinely wonder what the game plan is here.
Marathon has proven to PlayStation that extraction shooters are a niche genre and aren’t the next multi-billion-dollar genre to advance its GaaS ambitions. That’s without even mentioning 10 Chambers’ Den of Wolves, which, despite starting development in 2021, looks like a far better product and will satisfy that vault-cracking itch for many.
Is a couple of thousand concurrent players enough for PlayStation? I doubt it.
Will you be giving Fairgames a go? Let us know what you’re planning on the Insider Gaming Discord server.
For more Insider Gaming coverage, check out the news that Avalanche is working on a new open-world game
Tom Henderson is Insider Gaming's Co-Founder and Editor-In-Chief. When he's not running one of the industry's leading independent video game websites, he's probably playing an FPS like Call of Duty,…
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