Total War, Alien: Quarantine, hyena – The tone of the three games couldn’t be further separated if they tried.However, that is Creative Conference For You: A British institution known for its quality and prestige, popped up (well, not entirely out of nowhere) earlier this year to launch Hyena – a multiplayer, multi-team heist shooter with a hit in Big Bang, pop culture Great fun reference material, and zero-gravity movement to deliver a game unlike anything the studio has put out before.
in a hands-off presentation game showI saw a very lively and apparently vibrant video that highlights the main gist of the hyena: sneak into a spaceship cum shopping mall, steal loot (remains of a destroyed earth), and get away with you before anyone else hunts you down shit.
The game itself—including the zero-gravity part that makes you rethink the shootout, and the special ability that makes Apex Legends think “oh, that’s a bit much”—seems tense. After all, Creative Assembly knows what it’s doing. These developers are not hobbyists. Granted, the footage we recorded was alpha, and some of the animations and collisions were a bit unfinished, but the gist of the game was there: threesomes, each with a set of pros, but all encouraged to get into every struggle.
You and your team of pirates, the eponymous Hyena, are on a heist mission: eat as much shit as you can and take down hyper-capitalist corporate baddies in the process. These companies clone security guards (even life is commoditized when you have enough money) and deploy them to stop you from dying in your tracks. To make matters worse, as many as five other teams of human players have also started looting loot for themselves.
Think of a scaled-down battle royale, infused with Borderlands DNA, and pushed into a spaceship prison that doubles as an arcade. This is the United States Pharmacopoeia. You can play as Doc Hotfix, who thinks he’s in a video game (yes, really), a Reaper sniper with a questionable attitude, a drag queen who can use sass as a shield to protect her from bullets, or a drag queen Metal head ballerina who can kill gravity and float at will – possibly flipping Vs to anyone behind her. Pro, apparently influenced by the 1991 classic Point Break, wears a Nixon mask during the robbery. These reference books are kind of “family members,” you know?
A little too much. But hey, they’re downtime — that’s what these kinds of games have to do these days. At least Hyenas has its own identity, and it’s not a predatory free-to-play game that combines any asset with the lowest single cost in the Unreal Asset Store. It’s hard to say at this point, but the game seems to be fine: sniping at the hired AI thugs, throwing foam grenades to immobilize his power loader mate, then turning around to find another team of three hyenas – fully armed – are a Cool prospect. Plundering vaults, wreaking havoc with waves of AI idiots, and then having the real threat come out of nowhere? It’s like fate’s Gambit mode (mental age of 15).
The most annoying thing about all of this isn’t that the drag queen clicks her finger and sends bullets back to the sender, a Bioshock. Nor is it a “kitten bomb” that you can use to clear an entire arena full of enemies. No, it’s a blunt Sega Easter egg tucked into every spare hole in a hyena. The loot in the demo we saw? A doll of the famous Sega mascot Sonic the Hedgehog. The bomb you used to blow up the vault door? The Sega Mega Drive (or Sega Genesis, if you’re pagan) hooks up like plastic dynamite.
Why would you go out of your way to loot VHS players, betamax tapes, Walkmans (or their brand neutral siblings) and others if you can pull a superdrive out of your ass and use it to blow up a devastated planet A relic or a door of the doomed earth? Narrative traps aside, it feels a little…weird. Hyena has some lovely visual ideas—the entire plaza is dedicated to instruments of the past, and the Zero Gravity section is illuminated by GTA-style satirical commercials—but Sega’s nods all feel a bit cliché. Look closely and you’ll see Fall Guys and League of Legends. Critics of self-referential comedy, look away now.
Certain tentative elements of the game are desirable: even the drag queen’s “oh, no, she’s not” approach has its charms, you know? But these nudges-nudges-winks-winks Sega nods feel a little too much—like a kid thinking they’re smart enough to make a sly joke in a room full of adults.
It’s forgivable to think Hyena is a free-to-play game. It has the feel of Apex Legends more than anything else. But Sega says that’s not the case. I’m sure Creative Assembly will do the right thing with this new IP – this new, premium IP, no less. For god’s sake, it’s led by the former head of design for Red Dead Online. From what I’ve seen on Gamescom, I think it’s nowhere near the cult-like Alien: Isolation, and it won’t appeal to the Total War franchise’s devoted fanbase, but it will find its place. You might just want to mute it while you’re playing.
Hyena is coming to PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S in 2023. You can register for alpha now.
