HIVE: Altenum Wars

I went into HIVE: Altenum Wars looking for a competitive shooter that does something different, and the core idea here actually delivers on that promise - for about fifteen minutes. The Hexadium arenas are hexagon-shaped maps split into six zones, each running its own gravity direction. The screen rotates as you move across walls and ceilings, and when it clicks, you get those rare moments where you dash up a wall, flip your orientation, and drop onto an enemy who had no idea you were coming from that angle. That spatial trickery is legitimately interesting, and you will not find it in Overwatch, Valorant, or anything in the hero shooter genre that gets actual server traffic. The problem is that everything surrounding that central gimmick feels unfinished. There are four factions - human military UFG, the altenum-modified NHC, robots EVO, and the alien Aeons - each fielding Hexadiers with their own skill sets and pre-match weapon loadouts. The customisation loop sounds compelling on paper: mix hero abilities with your weapon choices to build a playstyle. In practice, the heroes do not feel distinct enough to matter. Combat feedback is thin, time-to-kill is inconsistent, and the rotating map perspective creates real visibility asymmetry - players camping elevated platforms can see significantly more of an enemy's model than those enemies can see back, which is the kind of positional imbalance that kills competitive trust fast. The single-player Survival mode, where you protect a payload against waves of enemies, works as a passable warmup range but not much more. The real wall you hit, and it comes quickly, is population. This game has been functionally dead in online matchmaking since not long after launch. Fifteen total Steam reviews, years after release, tells you everything you need to know about active player counts. If you cannot bring your own lobby - four to ten players via local or online co-op - you are signing up to stare at a search screen. The modes on offer (Team Deathmatch, King of the Hill, and the co-op Survival) are solid enough in structure, but they need bodies. King of the Hill in particular benefits from the gravity-rotation movement, since the map is designed to let you cut between capture points fast using wall routes, and when a full lobby is running it produces the kind of scrappy, spatial chaos that feels unlike anything else in the 2.5D space. For a PC shooter player in 2025, the honest assessment is this: the netcode and performance questions are largely moot because you will never find a public match. The underlying engine is Unreal Engine 4, the movement has a dash system that rewards learning the geometry, and the weapon roster covers enough archetypes - explosives for open zones, linear weapons and melee for the tight TDM corridors - that there is real loadout thinking available. None of it matters if you are solo queuing into an empty server. Bring a group, keep expectations calibrated to a 2018 indie budget, and you will find a genuinely odd little shooter that deserved more development time than it got. Fred, Scout Team