The Wall

I want to be straight with you before anything else: the Steam page for The Wall displays a prominent notice that servers are temporarily shut down. For a game that lives and dies entirely on its online PvP, that banner is a dealbreaker. No lobby, no match, no point. Keep that front of mind through everything I'm about to say, because the design ambitions here are genuinely interesting and it would be a shame to bury them without a fair hearing. The core idea is actually worth respecting. Two teams face off across a massive dividing wall in the center of each map. Your objective is to destroy the enemy team's generator on the other side, but you can't just sprint through a door and get there. The wall controls the tempo of the entire match, staying shut until it's manually or automatically opened. In the meantime, both teams are gathering three resources, wood, minerals, and energy, by chopping trees, mining crystals, and siphoning their own generator. Those currencies fund everything: fortifications, weapon upgrades, and offensive structures. Defensive players can sink resources into bunkers and fortified firing positions. Aggressive players can pour them into upgraded weapons and try to overwhelm whatever the enemy has built. The economy layer is what makes this more than a standard team shooter, and when it reportedly worked, the tension of that resource race before the wall opens genuinely sounded engaging. The terrain manipulation mechanic adds another wrinkle. Players can dig into and reshape the battlefield, which means the map you start on can look completely different by the midgame. Combined with a persistent inventory system where weapon upgrades and skill progressions carry over between matches, there is a real skeleton here of something with long-term hooks. The dev also went through a full overhaul post-launch, redoing the netcode, server infrastructure, and core gameplay from scratch after the 2018 release reportedly had serious problems. The overhauled version went free to play and trimmed the mode list, leaving one Versus mode across three maps with co-op cut from the current build. That brings us back to the big problem. Player count questions were appearing in the Steam forums even before the server shutdown notice went up. Community posts asking whether anyone is online paint a clear picture of a thin playerbase, and a thin playerbase in a team-based objective FPS is a death spiral. Time-to-kill, netcode quality, ranked balance, movement feel, these are all things I'd normally drill into here. I can't tell you whether the gunplay holds up or whether the economic pacing rewards smart play over random aggression, because right now there is no live environment to evaluate. The concept is novel enough that I genuinely wish I could give you a proper verdict on the shooting mechanics and whether the map design supports the wall-breach fantasy. Bottom line: the ambition to blend FPS shooting, RTS-style resource management, and terrain manipulation into one competitive package is the kind of experiment that deserves a real audience. The problem is that the servers being down makes this a zero-star experience in practice regardless of what the design doc promises. Check the Steam page before you do anything else, look for a community Discord, and see if the servers are back up. If they are and you can find a populated session, this might be worth a session or two out of sheer curiosity. If the notice is still up, walk away.

Fred · Scout Team

Shooters

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