Project Ethos: First hands-on impressions of 2K’s new roguelike hero shooter

Project Ethos is a new free-to-play third-person hero extraction shooter that mixes roguelike elements. The main gameplay of Project Ethos is an extraction mode. And while I was excited to finally see 31st Union’s first project since its inception in 2019, I couldn’t help but feel that many of the mechanics felt like they belonged to games from that year.

Here’s the thing: Project Ethos is fine as a game. As an extraction hero third-person shooter it hits all the right notes, but my first impression after a few hours of hands-on time is that it doesn’t seem to deliver on everything that really crosses genres in the roguelike or extraction shooter departments. In the preview, I was able to play as six different heroes, each with their own abilities and weapons, as expected.

This forces players to really familiarize themselves with that character’s secondary abilities, as abilities in a hero shooter are intended to enhance one’s playstyle. Your shooting comes first. And Project Ethos has some fun weapon sets that I really enjoyed playing with. The learning curve for characters and skills was fairly low, so new players won’t feel too overwhelmed when jumping into Project Ethos.

The test mode is PvPvE, which means you play against both real players and NPC enemies that exist on the map. The games you join are persistent, meaning every time you join a game, other players have already been playing that game for some time. Every time you queue you can see how much time is left in the game.

In persistent matches, this means that when you jump into a game, you may end up closer to some enemies running around the map. This also means that you will face players who are of a higher level than you. Each Trials game has its own leveling system. You earn XP by collecting XP shards from various loot containers you come across, killing enemies, and completing events that are randomly triggered around the map.

The events that could appear on the map were a bit confusing at first glance. It was hard to tell where some of the events took place just by looking at the overall map. You would really have to look at your immediate surroundings to find the local event and then activate it. After a few rounds of play I got used to this method, but it was frustrating not seeing the smaller events on the map.

As you level up in a match, you can choose one of three different power-ups for your character. There is a pool of 27 different power-ups to customize your play style. And this is where the roguelike element comes into play. You can earn up to nine different power-ups in one extraction run if you choose to stay in the game that long and at that level.

Random events that appear on the map include various activities that unlock a large loot chest with larger XP boosts, weapon upgrades and cores. Cores are the expensive items you’ll want to collect on each run, as extracting them with cores allows you to purchase upgrades at the main center. These increase the ability to get power-ups faster, give you health drops from the NPC bots you fight in the game, and other bonuses.

However, none of these expansions increase your damage to other players, so it’s pretty balanced in that regard. The Trials felt quite balanced overall in terms of gameplay, as you could choose to back away from battles if things got too sticky. It felt like a real survival experience with the typical extraction shooters. While you could feel the imbalance of the characters’ weapons, with one dealing higher DPS than the other, you still had the option of fleeing to compensate for this problem.

In the second game mode I was able to play called Gauntlet, there was no escape. You take part in a 3v3v3v3 match where you play against another team in a small arena. The first team to achieve 3 wins wins. You are on a server full of other teams as your opponent changes every time in the Dutch round robin format.

This format pits the bottom half of teams against the top half of teams: Team 1 faces Team 5, Team 2 faces Team 6. According to the definition of the Dutch round-robin tournament, you should not play one team more than twice compete. Regardless, this format was the only thing that worked for this game mode.

Gauntlet really showed the imbalance between character abilities and weapons, as you’re forced to face your opponents head-on with very little room for maneuver. The sniper Prisma is incredibly strong and her primary beam weapon quickly melts enemies at close range, and her sniper rifle allows her to deal devastating damage from a distance. Combined with her E ability, where she creates a prism field that increases damage dealt, she is an incredibly difficult character to defeat in Gauntlet.

In Gauntlet you still have the roguelike element of having to choose from a selection of your power-ups. This further highlighted the imbalance of character damage and powers. However, I liked the competitive aspect of Gauntlet over Trials. It showed a lot of what competitive gaming in Project Ethos could feel like.

The gameplay loop of Trials and Gauntlet is very demanding and unexciting. They are not experiences that you cannot have elsewhere and in which you have already invested time. Fortnite came to mind while playing Project Ethos and I compared some of the mechanics present in Fortnite to those that benefit Project Ethos tremendously.

Overall, I really enjoyed my time with Project Ethos, but in the end I was disappointed with the game overall. Ultimately, Project Ethos plays well, is fun, and uses the extraction and roguelike aspects to its advantage, but at first glance it doesn’t seem like a new experience that players will want to experience again and again.