For those who enjoy their shooters weird, there’s just no better option on the market right now than Sulfur. Having only just come out via Steam Early Access, Sulfur follows up on its excellent April demo with a surprisingly content-heavy beta launch. Notably, the aforementioned demo is still around!
If you’d forgive my excitement, it’s not often that I get so taken aback by an Early Access release. Sulfur is absolutely choc-full of content already and though it’s a tad rough around certain edges still, owing to it being objectively unfinished, I cannot recommend it enough. It’s a solo dungeon crawler/extraction shooter hybrid that offers almost hilariously intricate weapon customization and cooking (yup) mechanics. Combine those with genuinely stellar gunplay, and you get a winning combo.
Sulfur is out now in Early Access, but the demo is available as well
Though I’m yet to play through them all, I was surprised and thrilled to learn that Sulfur has launched into Early Access with five whopping biomes already, and a bunch more to come in the future. As per the developer Perfect Random’s statement on Steam, the game is aiming for “the record of the shortest Early Access period in history—famous last words, right.”
Perfect Random continues: “All the future content is designed and scoped out, ready to be implemented and tested. However, since SULFUR is a system-based Roguelike Adventure, it requires a fair bit of tinkering and fine-tuning to get everything just right. We want to ensure the final product is something special, and getting there with your feedback will be key.”
Sulfur‘s content roadmap is hefty indeed. Here’s the order of business for Perfect Random, albeit without any proper timeline as to when each of these steps might be done and dusted:
- Fixing shit
- Deep Woods biome
- Guns & Magic expansion
- Fortress biome
- Desert biome
- Revenge (final boss fight?)
- Endless Mode
The final entry on this list (which is posted on Sulfur‘s official Steam page) is curious: a stretch goal for the implementation of co-op multiplayer mode. As it currently stands, Sulfur‘s a pure-blooded single-player game, but if Perfect Order moves over 200,000 copies of Sulfur, it’s going to begin working on proper drop-in co-op multiplayer: “It’ll feel just like single-player, with shared progression and item drops, so you and your buddy can build your arsenals and tackle the challenges of SULFUR side-by-side,” says the developer’s blog post.
Stellar stuff, that, though I have to admit I’ve got virtually no interest in co-op myself. Sulfur is a tad janky and doesn’t perform quite as well as it should, I’ll concede, but it plays remarkably well and comes with full Steam Deck support by default. Nice!
I highly recommend giving this one a whirl. Even the demo alone is loaded with hours’ worth of content, and that build of the game is totally free.
Published: Oct 29, 2024 09:33 am