We’d been waiting a little while to learn something concrete about Creative Assembly’s long-rumoured first-person shooter, but when Hyenas was finally revealed, the response was maybe a little muted. Hyenas was a surprise: Creative Assembly had been an entirely strategy-based studio for decades until it released Alien Isolation, a small, considered first-person game. A multiplayer, co-op, character-based shooter with a loud and brash tone doesn’t seem like the most natural follow-up.
Hyenas
- Publisher: Sega
- Developer: Creative Assembly
- Platform: PC, Xbox One, Xbox X/S, PS4, PS5
- Availability: TBC
But then, Alien Isolation wasn’t exactly a natural follow-up to Total War, and speaking to Eurogamer at Gamescom, product director Alex Hunnisett explained that, actually, these games are rarely interlinked – despite some staff from within the studio moving across to work on it.
“Really, when we were looking at Hyenas, it was a case of going, well, what are folks enjoying playing at the moment, for starters, and the great thing about working in a studio is often you’re enjoying doing something, you’ve got enough capable people around you just go, ‘let’s just do that then.'” Aside from the fact that both games are set in space, he said, that’s really where the similarities or shared inspirations end. Hyenas, like Alien Isolation before it, is very much its own thing.
I watched a roughly 10-minute, behind closed doors demo of Hyenas that gave an overview of how a match might play out. There are five teams, three players per team, and you’re on a kind of floating mall in space trying to secure some loot – or to be more accurate: some branded tat, frankly, but there is a sort of explanation for that – and then escape. There are a significant number of non-player enemies called Murphs, of varying classes – drones, riot shields, big tough ones, the usual stuff – and there are things that take some time, like opening doors and drifting through zero-gravity areas that play with the pacing of your movement through objectives. Usually, that means fighting through areas, sprinting for loot, getting held up by something, and running away with it again.
Hyenas actually sounds like it features the best parts of a squad-based battle royale
This set-up, and the weirdly tatty tone it’s opting for, somewhat undersells Hyenas, at least from looking at it purely hands-off. There’s genuine potential here, most notably in the type of games Hyenas reminds you of when you watch a match in action. The real crux of it, for instance, seems to be in how you deal with other squads of human players – the kind of instinctual decision-making that’s at the heart of some many wonderful games in this genre. You can treat Hyenas stealthily, for instance, taking advantage of something Hunnisett called a “front of house, back of house element” where there are routes through vent shafts and the like, as well as the obvious ones out in the open, or you can act as the predators of the map, seeking out and ambushing or just plain attacking other teams, as they busy themselves with objectives or AI enemies.
Towards the end of a round, you’ll need to not only obtain the loot but, when you’ve filled up something called a clout gauge, also get to an evacuation zone and survive until the end. Put all this together and it starts to ring a few bells. A shooter, with multiple small teams, trapped in a confined space, with a small ending zone that forces you together, and a rolling tactical choice of whether to fight, hide, or ambush each other – Hyenas actually sounds like it features the best parts of a squad-based battle royale. It’s just achieving the same ends via completely different means.
Hunnisett raised an eyebrow when I put that comparison to him, mind, so I might be stretching things with my interpretation. But it’s ultimately these kinds of ever-changing, strategic – “emergent”, as a marketer might put it – moments that really elevate the more tactical team shooters out there, the things that players come up with themselves that might evolve the original intention of the game. Hyenas looks like it has a bit of that.