Egress

I want to like Egress. The pitch is genuinely interesting: melee-focused PvP arena set on a sinking, multi-level Innsmouth, where the rising flood replaces the usual shrinking circle and forces survivors upward through elevator shafts and rooftops while monsters and rival players close in from every angle. That is a real idea, not a cynical reskin. The Lovecraftian-Victorian-Electropunk setting is atmospheric in a way that most indie arena games never bother with, and the synthwave soundtrack in the menus at least sets the right mood before things start to fall apart. On paper the combat system checks interesting boxes: dodge timing, melee combos, ability combinations, artifact pickups, and 13 characters with genuinely distinct loadouts and roles. The Bloodkeeper bleeds itself to generate projectiles. There is a stealth-capable class that can vanish mid-fight. Factions, Explorers, Bandits, Mercenaries, and Guards, each bring a different read on the map. The verticality of the city, with its sewer tunnels, bars, clinics, and multi-floor buildings, gives the arena real navigational texture. That is more structural ambition than most small-studio PvP games attempt at launch. The problem is execution. The combat animations are stiff and the hit feedback is poor, which in a melee game where every dodge window matters is basically a death sentence for the skill ceiling. Poise and reaction are everything in souls-style PvP, and when the physics fail to communicate impact clearly, reads become guesses. Class balance landed badly too: some heroes feel irrelevant while others have abilities that make the matchup effectively unwinnable. That kind of imbalance can be patched, but it never was. Development has stalled, and the community that might have pressured fixes never built up enough mass to matter. The biggest problem for a PvP-only game is the one you cannot design your way out of: there is no playerbase. The developer appears to have gone quiet, servers in multiple regions have been reported as empty or near-empty for years, and there is no offline or AI mode to fill the gap. A game that is entirely dependent on live opponents, with no matchmaking depth, no ranked ladder, and no cross-platform support to pool numbers, is not really playable in any meaningful sense right now. The foundation had something worth building on, and it was never built.

Fred · Scout Team

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