A year on, is Sega’s shooter ready to break free from the pack?
Ushered through the prefab airlock system of Hyenas’ Gamescom booth, we’re presented with a video of the game’s tutorial that whizzes by at unhelpful speed, failing to compete with the volume of the show floor so that we have to rely on the subtitles. Which are, of course, in German. This is not the ideal way to meet any game, let alone one that stacks together as many ideas as Hyenas. Yet we can’t help but assume an advantage over the dozen rival thieves crammed into this briefing pen: after all, we saw the game at Creative Assembly’s HQ ahead of the previous Gamescom. This, surely, is tantamount to a 12-month head start. Three minutes and one squad wipe later, watching the last surviving team rampage through vaults of ’80s-themed loot, we’re forced to reconsider our optimism.
Might Creative Assembly, perhaps, be feeling something similar? When we saw the game last summer, it was badged with a tentative 2023 release date. You have to assume, then, that the studio wasn’t expecting to be here in Cologne once again, talking not about launch but the opening of Hyenas’ first beta. And certainly not in the shadow of an earnings call where Sega executives named it “a challenging title” still in search of the correct business model, with the developer “striving to improve its quality”.
These challenges can’t have come as a complete surprise, though. Any multiplayer shooter nowadays enters an arena littered with contenders that got wiped out early, while the fortunate few reap the loot. Approaching E376’s cover story with that in mind, we came away convinced that Creative Assembly’s survival strategy was sound, at least in principle: a kind of anti-camouflage, loading Hyenas with so many ideas and so much personality that it couldn’t be mistaken for any of its competitors. Not many games offer the opportunity to coat a foe in insulation foam then shoot a nearby switch to deactivate gravity, rendering them a helpless clay pigeon, to the strains of A-ha piped through some distant public-address system.
As the player population is whittled down, we glimpse the game’s strange, frantic magic
Successfully orchestrating such ploys, though, will require serious investment from players. Associate game director Christoph Will acknowledges that “if you put it side by side with another game,” Hyenas has more to pick up than most. “You have to play ten to 15 sessions to get a good gras
