Snowpiercer is a fun watch, but I don’t think I ever would have thought to use the concept of the movie for a PvPvE first-person shooter. But that’s what Enginefall feels like, and it makes for one of the more interesting shooters I’ve previewed over the past year, especially with how it uses mechanics and features from the extraction subgenre. When it comes to Enginefall, so far, I most enjoy how it creates incentives for players to approach each new area with either violence or peace, and rewards both playstyles. That could go a long way toward attracting players who want that PvP experience and those who are content with PvE without alienating either group.
In Enginefall, you play as a scavenger trying to survive in an uninhabitable wasteland. Life is only sustainable on the many rails that circle the globe, and so you make your home in a small train where you can 3D print simple armor, weapons, and supplies. But your train always needs fuel, incentivizing you to seek out resource-rich, behemoth-sized trains that you can grapple onto to pillage. You always enter these mammoth locomotives from the rearmost car where defenses are low, and then you can make your way forward through the train in search of what you need.
It’s a narrative set-up that doesn’t quite live up to expectations. While the huge trains you invade are clearly owned by people who are far richer than you, they’re dilapidated in most places–visually, they seem worse off than the spiffy home base train you’re able to decorate and make your own. Enginefall’s world feels empty, and the trains currently don’t contain anything in the way of text or audio logs, or much in the way of other forms of environmental storytelling. And while there are non-player characters, you can’t interact with them–they’re either crazed scavengers who swing at you like mindless zombies or corporate soldiers who keep the peace in select “safe zones” on the train.
I do like the zombie-like scavengers because it creates dangers in the less-traveled areas of the trains, like maintenance shafts and gas-filled chambers. Their inclusion means that the sense of tension is maintained even if you don’t want to engage in PvP, as avoiding other players means encountering hordes of dangerous creatures. But the police-like soldiers feel underutilized. You ignore these guards and they ignore you, but attack them (or other players) in their presence and they’ll eviscerate you. It’s interesting that their very presence enforces the safety of safe zones, but there’s not much to do in those zones other than catch your breath. Where are the characters for me to talk to? Why can’t I use these areas as hubs to connect with other players? How come I can’t engage in some gameplay-driven story event, like what’s seen in Fortnite or Apex Legends?
Thankfully, Enginefall’s gameplay loop–reaching a new car in the train, scavenging for what you need, preparing for the next car, and making your way forward–is entertaining, which makes up for its shortcomings in terms of narrative elements. The closer you get to the front of the train, the greater the reward: huge caches of resources, high-tier weapons, and grade-A equipment and armor. However, this also increases the risk as other players are in the train with you, so moving through the train toward better stuff means moving toward players armed with better stuff. Transfer points between each train car prevent players from going back to weaker areas, while also creating dangerous choke points where people know that new squads or solo players will emerge from.
Death means the loss of anything you’ve accrued that’s on your body. Some train cars contain ejection points that allow you to jettison one or two pieces of gear back to your home train, and you can call in your home train to extract what you have even if you haven’t reached the front. The big issue there is that calling for an extraction of any kind alerts the rest of the train, which may convince another player to ambush you and steal your goodies. You can also set up makeshift bases in the train to hoard what you’ve found, create a spawn point if you were to die on the train, and craft weapons and items of the blueprints you collect, though other players may try to invade your temporary home to steal what you have or destroy your spawn point. I certainly did while playing, delighting in the theft of other players’ hard-earned resources, weapons, and armor.
I didn’t play through too much PvP in my time with Enginefall, but the little I saw met the standard of other shooters. Shotguns have a heft to them, for example, and pistols and rifles pierce through targets with speed and precision. More than anything, the weapons I had would act as a deterrent. While proximity chat allows you to scream a quick, “friendly, friendly,” when approaching another player, from my short experience with the game, it seems like the best way to keep someone from messing with you is to have a bunch of good stuff equipped and advertise yourself as a threat.
My squad stuck to hidden tunnels and scrambled across the outside platforms and roof of the train, scavenging for scraps on the outskirts of the train cars and only venturing further when we were so well-outfitted, that no one would easily mess with us. That didn’t prevent a few tense encounters from playing out, including one in which a player tried to crouch-walk their way up to my character to loot my pockets. They only stopped once it became apparent that I wasn’t alone, but they stuck around in the vicinity of us for a while, like a desperate hyena. There were quite a few moments where I stared them down from across a walkway, both of us having firearms drawn on each other but refraining from firing to not accidently attract the notice of the other players I could hear through the walls of the train. I can see why so many of my peers like extraction shooters now–while Enginefall isn’t quite like Arc Raiders or Marathon or Tarkov, it has similar elements, truncating the experience into five-to-10-minute excursions.
If you do happen to make it to the very front of the train and enter the cabin, you’re rewarded with a ton of fuel and extremely high-tier gear. You can also blow the train’s horn and make announcements to the rest of the train via an intercom–while playing Enginefall during the preview, members of the team commented that, currently, a lot of playtesters who are streamers use the opportunity to market their Twitch channels. Graciously, I was not subjected to that during the preview, but I can already imagine how a group of annoying players near the front of a train could be all the incentive I’d need to storm the front and put an end to their shenanigans.
While I was not able to reach the front of the train during my preview, I did get to experience “enginefall,” which is when the train you’re riding on has essentially been wiped so clean that it’s time for a reset. The game does this by setting a timer and warning the occupants that the entire train is going to derail and explode, giving all players still on the train a small window to grab what they can and flee back to their personal trains.
I … may have been a little greedy and didn’t make it out. Impossible to say, for sure. History will never know. The entire minute-long segment was thrilling, however, with a lot of players scrambling for exits, all while shooting at each other in a last-ditch gamble to secure someone else’s loot ahead of jumping ship.
The two or so hours I spent with Enginefall were a ton of fun, and I’m looking forward to the release, which is scheduled for later this year. Of course, as always, the biggest worry I have for this game is whether it will find the player count it needs to thrive. We’ve seen plenty of live-service shooters in the past few years, like Arc Raiders and Marathon, find the necessary player numbers to at least exist; but we’ve also seen development for live-service shooters like Rainbow Six: Extraction end, and–as was the case for the likes of Anthem, Concord, and Highguard–conclude with such finality that the games were taken offline. For Enginefall to have a chance, it needs to secure an audience of its own rather quickly after it launches.
