Guardians Of The Past

I went looking for an online match and found tumbleweeds. That is the first and most important thing to know about Guardians of the Past: the game has no bots, the online player pool is functionally empty, and the whole experience collapses without a group of two to four people you can physically or digitally drag into a session. If you have that group locked in before you launch, the pitch gets more interesting. If you don't, close this tab. So what are you actually getting for those friends? A top-down arena brawler that layers trap-building on top of direct combat. Before each round, you and your opponents place gadgets across a hex-grid arena -- launchpads that send players airborne, electrical fields, fire hazards, pools of tar and poison -- and then you drop in and fight over weapons that spawn randomly mid-match. Melee options like a high-knockback hammer sit alongside ranged picks including miniguns and shotguns, and there are a couple of exotic tools like a grappling hook and a control-inverting staff that can absolutely tilt a round in stupid, funny ways. There are two distinct modes: one where trap placement happens before the whistle blows, and a second where the game's systems gradually pile hazards onto the arena during the fight itself. On paper, that variety is genuinely smart for a two-person indie studio's debut. On a monitor, the execution is shakier. Performance is rough -- expect framerate dips that feel like the engine is thinking too hard, and input feedback that does not clearly communicate weapon cooldowns or how much damage you just dealt. Spawn points are fixed, which means a canny opponent can position themselves to punish you the moment you respawn. Hitboxes and health values feel inconsistent enough that it can be hard to read how a fight is actually going. The keyboard-and-controller conflict is also a documented friction point for mixed-input local sessions, which matters when the couch co-op crowd is exactly the audience this game is pitching to. Rough and clunky are the honest words for it. The concept underneath all of that roughness is genuinely worth something. Mixing pre-round trap strategy with live deathmatch combat is a clean idea. The arenas have distinct themes and environmental wrinkles. When the launchpad sends someone straight into an electrical field you placed two minutes ago, it lands the kind of chaotic laugh that carries a local multiplayer session. For a two-person studio learning the craft, there is real creativity in the design DNA. The problem is that the finished product needed more time and polish to compete with the established local-brawler crowd. Bottom line: treat it as a couch game, not an online game. Get four people in the same room or on a voice call with Steam Remote Play Together, accept that the controls and performance are not going to be silky, and you can mine a couple of good evenings out of it. Go in expecting a tight competitive experience with a functioning online ladder and you will be disappointed fast.

Fred · Scout Team

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