The developers who remade Half-Life as Black Mesa are working on a new roguelite co-op shooter. It will feature no physicists celebrating Bring Your Shotgun To Work Day, but instead let up to four players tactically breach oil rigs and airports occupied by corporate-sponsored mercenaries. In Rogue Point the richest CEO on earth has croaked it, causing various megacorps to compete in a violent bum rush for control of that wealth. Which is where your team of renegade shooterists come in. They don’t want to win this contest, they just want everyone else to lose.
Lots of Rainbow Six style a-breachin’ and a-clearin’ going on in that trailer there. We see blast charges, silencers, and one player using a big handheld battering ram to bust down a door while another tosses what’s probably a flashbang over the threshold. The Steam page calls it “high-octane tactical combat meets strategic planning” with “tough, unyielding enemies”.
It also says maps will be “reshaped” with every playthrough by something called a “Parametric Design System”. Big word, that, parametric. Luckily, I am immune to big words. It is a fancy way of saying the maps (a mall, an office, etc) will feature some amount of randomness. But whether that’s enemies, layout, objects – or something else – we’re not told. Whatever it is, they promise variety, which will be important if we’re to be SWATing it through dangerous corridors. Imagine checking the same corner twice, yuck.
It sounds a bit like Ready Or Not, a hardcore tactical co-op shooter that’s all about storming rooms full of bad guys with hostages and the like. The multplayer shooter is an interesting route for Crowbar Collective to go following their recreation of Black Mesa, but it also makes some sense, given that the reworked weaponry animations were a big strength of Gordon’s Great Gallivant, an adventure Graham called “the most impressive fan game ever made”. Personally, I need a little more than “co-op roguelite shooter” to get excited about guns. But different strokes for militant folks and all that.
Rogue Point is being published by Team 17 and has a loose early access release date of 2025.