Hybrid ARPG genres don’t always work. Take for example the recently canceled Magic: Legends, a game that combined Diablo-style ARPG gameplay with Magic: The Gathering mechanics and an MMO approach to new content releases. Legends exchanged traditional loot drops and power progression for card collecting and deckbuilding, and the result was a hodgepodge of ideas that couldn’t satisfy ARPG or card game fans. On the opposite end of the spectrum is Gatewalkers, a game that combines seemingly disparate genres in a way that makes them feel like they were always meant to be together. Not all of Gatewalkers ideas feel fully formed yet, but there’s more than enough evidence to show that A2 Softworks is on the right track. Gatewalkers is scratching an itch I didn’t even know I had.
It’s fascinating to see how well survival mechanics fit into an ARPG game. Aside from mobs of enemies and quest objectives, each sprawling environment is full of resources to harvest. As you fight your way through each procedurally generated map, you’ll need to take time to chop down trees, mine metal nodes, collect herbs, and skin the hide off of your victims. All of those resources are used to craft new, better weapons and armor back. Rather than farming for rare drops in hopes of improving your gear score, you’ll be farming for crafting materials so you can make upgrades yourself.
As a survival game fan, this turned out to be an incredibly satisfying experience. I’ve spent hours grinding Diablo 3 without so much as a new belt to show for it, and once you get to the point where only best-in-slot gear will do, the game can feel pretty unrewarding. Gatewalkers, on the other hand, offers a more direct path towards upgrades. There’s still RNG when it comes to finding rare crafting materials, but it never feels like you’re grinding away in hopes of finding a random rare item to drop, at least not in the first few hours.
Gatewalkers offers a really cool way to target the materials you’re after too. Every time you leave the hub city, you’ll be able to make some choices about the kind of biome you explore. You’ll be able to see what kind of resources are most common in each world, so if you’re looking for a particular type of wood to upgrade your grenade launcher, for example, you’ll at least know you’re looking in the right place.
Speaking of grenade launchers, Gatewalkers offers a pretty impressive variety of weapons and armor to craft. Rather than choosing a single class to play, you can build your abilities and playstyle around your gear. Every weapon offers a different set of abilities to use, and as you craft more powerful versions, you’ll unlock new combo abilities and elemental synergies.
Gatewalkers is meant to be played co-op, and a lot of the puzzles and combat mechanics are built around groups of players. Elemental synergies, for example, can only be used when playing in a party. Every time you deal elemental damage to an enemy you’ll add a debuff stack to their health bar. Once it gets up to six, a teammate can use a complementary elemental attack to consume the stack and deal massive damage. It’s a unique system that encourages planning on coordination between players. It works great when playing with friends because you can make sure everyone is using complementary elements. When matchmaking with random players online though, you’ll just have to cross your fingers and hope that your elements overlap. It’s a really rewarding mechanic, but the limitations do make it a bit narrow.
Survival is also a big focus in Gatewalkers. You have to manage your food and water by filling waterskins in creeks, harvesting meat and vegetables from the environment, and cooking meals on campfires. At night, you have to keep the lights on either by carrying a torch, sleeping at a campfire, or consuming glowing mushrooms or else your sanity will drop and you’ll have to fight a neverending swarm of nightmares. You need to manage your temperature in cold environments and wear a gas mask when you visit toxic biomes. You also have to manage your weight, meaning you can’t spend all day collecting lumber in a single biome.
A lot of this may sound tedious to some people, but I found all of the survival mechanics to be incredibly refreshing for this genre. Rather than mindlessly running Greater Rifts one after another that all blend together, Gatewalkers’ missions are always engaging. You have to plan ahead of time when you visit biomes that don’t have natural water to refill your waterskins with or else you’ll end up leaving early and missing out on hidden treasures. It’s a good idea to prep meals and potions before visiting specific worlds, but you’ll have to prepare to be prepared by first farming the ingredients. Gatewalkers sets itself far apart from most other ARPGs by giving a lot of weight to your consumables and how you plan to use them.
It’s hard to tell how long of a tail Gatewalkers has, but the huge variety of craftable gear makes it seem like we’ll be able to get a lot of hours out of the game. Even if you’re hard committed to one type of weapon or build, the developers cleverly built in an incentive to unlock everything on the skill tree. By unlocking more gear, even if you never actually craft it, you’ll earn new passive bonuses. These bonuses can be mixed and matched together to further create interesting builds. Hopefully, this level of customization will have a huge impact in the end game. My only worry is that there will be nothing left to pursue once you’ve created the highest tier version of your preferred weapons, but it seems like these passive unlocks might help extend the late game.
Gatewalkers isn’t the prettiest game of 2021, but I think its approach to survival action RPGs is pretty inspired. The hybridization is handled so well in Gatewalkers that it actually surprised me that we haven’t seen other games like it before. Co-op is essentially mandatory, so Gatewalkers will definitely need a healthy player base if it's going to be successful. I’m skeptical that it will have a meaty enough end game to keep people playing, but I’m excited to find out for myself when Gatewalkers launches on Steam later this year.