Interstellar Marines is a science fiction first-person shooter video game being developed by indie studio Zero Point Software. It was added to Steam Greenlight on September 3, 2012 and later released on Steam Early Access on July 2, 2013.
Interstellar Marines is being developed in four acts, formerly planned as individual titles. The first act, code-named "Prologue", is currently in development and takes place in a future military training facility that will stage multiplayer, single-player, and cooperative training scenarios. Multiplayer was the first feature of Prologue to be built, doubling as both a tech foundation for future co-op missions and as a playable Early Access release on Steam. The first co-op mission, titled The NeuroGen Incident, was released on September 26, 2014 which built much of the technology needed for future co-op campaigns.
The three acts after Prologue, collectively titled the "Trilogy", will be narrative-driven campaigns spanning a continuous story arc set in "a realistic and unpredictable future where first contact with another sentient species is slowly becoming reality." The campaigns will support single-player and up to four players in drop-in/drop-out co-op. Zero Point Software claims that their co-op campaign will feature tactical game-play, role-playing elements, open-ended level design, and a compelling sci-fi storyline. It claims to pay homage to old-school tactical first person shooters like Rainbow Six 3: Raven Shield and cites System Shock 2 and Deus Ex for their action RPG elements and open-ended levels, as well as Half-Life for its first person narrative-driven storytelling.
Gameplay
The player controls an individual Marine from a first person perspective with functions for walking, running, jumping, crouching, peeking over cover, leaning, sprinting, and sliding. The Marine suite has regenerative armor and the Marine will be disabled when the armor is fully damaged. The Marine's suit also measures oxygen saturation levels, which increase due to activity and affect the player's aim stability as the level increases. The Marine has three weapons available, a pistol, submachine gun, and assault rifle. The SMG and AR can have a suppressor attached and have three fire modes, semi-auto, burst, and full-auto, while the pistol only fires in semi-auto mode. Each weapon features a tactical flashlight and a laser sight. Game modes feature PvE and PvP encounters. In PvE, players fight against several types of Combat Training Robots (CTRs), androids which can carry weapons or can charge at the player with a weaponless melee attack. All modes allow reviving fallen teammates, within a time limit, at the location where they fell.
The single-player and co-op content consists of campaign-style missions, Elimination challenges, and Survival challenges. Missions require following waypoints to objectives, which can include routing power or finding key cards to unlock sections of a map, while eliminating enemy CTRs. Elimination challenges require eliminating all CTRs on a map and Survival challenges require activating power nodes around a map while eliminating or avoiding spawning CTRs. If a fallen teammate is not revived within a time limit, they will respawn at a checkpoint or will be locked out of a mission once available respawns have been depleted.
Some of the PvP modes offered are Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, Team Domination, and Deadlock. These modes all share the same map pool and players have infinite ammo allowing unlimited weapon reloads. In team-based modes, if a player is not revived, they will respawn at a spawn point automatically. Team Domination is a king of the hill mode with a moving capture zone. Each team starts with 1000 points. Teams deplete points from the opposing team by having more players than the opponent within the designated zone. The dominating team depletes points each second for each player within the zone more than the opponent. The losing team is the team that reaches 0 points first or the team with the least points after 10 minutes have elapsed. Deadlock is a team-based territory capture mode. A Deadlock match consists of multiple rounds on one map. To win a map, a team must win the first 3 rounds or otherwise win 2 rounds in a row. The first team to eliminate all players or to capture all seven capture zones at once wins the round. Fallen players who are not revived in time will enter a respawn queue and will respawn automatically after 2 minutes, but will be respawned earlier if a teammate captures a capture zone. The round ends after 10 minutes if no team has secured a win.