Disintegration

The Halo and Destiny co-creator returns with a new vision.

- Chris Burke

One of the surprise highlights from this year’s Gamescom was the opportunity to get hands-on with Disintegration, the latest game from Halo co-creator Marcus Lehto and his V1 Interactive development studio. Lehto had left Bungie a few years ago, having given the world the Master Chief, the Warthog and other bona fide game iconography, and also the studio’s other huge franchise, Destiny.

His latest project is a tactical sci-fi shooter that, for perhaps the first time ever, successfully marries the fastpaced fluid action of a first-person shooter with the combat smarts needed for a real-time strategy game. You control a squad on the ground from your ‘grav cycle’, which you’re using to fly above the battlefield – firing off ordnance and orders in equally fun measure.

In our session we played in squads of 4v4, with our objective either to seize power cores or defend them amidst the brick and concrete ruins of abandoned Earth factories and buildings. With each squad hugely customisable and stylistically unique, you won’t find another shooter that plays quite like this. The grav cycle essentially hovers, with you in control of tilt, pitch and height, somewhere between two and 16 metres off the ground. Your airborne bike is heavily armed, you see your hands in first-person gripping the controls for those huge guns which can switch between firing modes, doing serious damage to ground units and enemy grav cycles. But you’re also directing your squad via a similar process to ‘pinging’ in other squad shooters, and you’re able to simply and effectively order soldiers to move to a different position, dig in and defend, push forward and so forth. Gone is the need for time stopping command wheels – you’re bossing soldiers on the fly, literally.

Matter of perspective