The Pit: Infinity
Kerberos Productions
There is an emerging subgenre of first-person shooters called looter-shooters that is becoming quite popular since one of the biggest ones, Tom Clancy’s The Division, debuted a few years ago. In The Division and other similar games such as Remnant: From the Ashes, you take control of a character and run around shooting up bad people or monsters.
After you dispatch them, you are normally free to grab their loot and upgrade your weapons and gear with whatever you find. But what about games that emulate these elements but don’t necessarily allow you to swap out your weapons for better ones? Kerberos Productions’, The Pit: Infinity is one such game.
The Pit: Infinity is a science fiction-themed first-person shooter that has rogue-like elements at play as well. The game’s setting is an old abandoned laboratory that has been overrun by all manner of monstrosities. Your mission is simple—descend through the many levels of the facility in order to clear out all of these dangerous foes, in the hopes of finding the source of a catastrophic plague that annihilated most of humanity.
Each of the lab’s levels contains an elevator that you must fight through waves of enemies to get to, in order to access the next level down. However, every level that you manage to descend to is filled with increasingly harder adversaries that you must contend with.
There are three classes in total that you can choose from in The Pit: Infinity. The Scout is nimble, moves fast, and also has great medical and tech skills. The Engineer is more about manipulating electronic gadgets and gizmos, as well as being good at crafting items. And lastly, there’s the Marine, who is a walking tank and has good mechanical skills that are great for opening the various containers you’ll come across throughout the game’s levels.
The Marine’s extra weapon, the auto-rifle, is also great at dispatching enemies, which is a tremendous help to the party since this game isn’t a looter-shooter and hence, it’s pretty tough to find additional weapons. Therefore, the Marine is pretty much a mandatory class to have in your party at all times. Unfortunately, all of the classes are gender-locked.
Characters in The Pit: Infinity have three main attributes, namely Might, Finesse, and Brains. Each of these traits affect how well your character can perform specific tasks. There are also different skills that you can specialize in, such as lock-picking. Lock-picking is crucial since it helps to open such things as doors. However, you only have a certain amount times you can attempt your lock-picking before a keypad locks you out for good. As you gain experience and level your character up, you get the opportunity to spend your experience points on any skills that your particular party needs. Teamwork is definitely key here.
Interestingly enough, The Pit: Infinity is a newer version of an older game called Sword of the Stars: The Pit, which was an isometric, turn-based game. While you’d think that this newer, first-person shooter iteration would be more fluid as far as game mechanics go, The Pit: Infinity suffers from some pretty wonky controls. This can be pretty frustrating because sometimes they’ll cause the death of your character and since this is a rogue-like affair, once they’re gone they’re gone for good.
Distance is also hard to judge within the many dangerous levels of the laboratory. Most of the time, there’s this odd haze that inundates each level. The haze is so thick at some junctures that you can’t even see where your enemies are coming from or where they’ll retreat to. Strangely, these same enemies don’t seem to have any issues finding out exactly where you and your friends are.
Even though loot is pretty hard to come by in The Pit: Infinity, there’s a lot of stuff that you can interact with. You can do such things as link up or unplug electrical cables, repair all kinds of different pieces of equipment, lock-pick or tear the doors off of lockers, and disarm traps. Therefore, you always want to thoroughly check your environs before moving off to other areas, which can be quite a hassle since you’re constantly being hit by waves and waves of enemies.
As it stands, The Pit: Infinity is pretty decent for a low budget, first-person shooter. If you’re thinking about picking it up, you may want to wait until its developers patch it up in the coming weeks and months.
SCORE: 70%
The Pit: Infinity has some pretty nice looking graphics that make its action-based gameplay truly shine. However, you want to have a pretty beefy gaming PC or gaming laptop in order to play it at a decent framerate. So, you may just want to invest in a decent gaming rig:
Visit CyberpowerPC’s website to check out all of the other great deals as well!