2K reveals free-to-play hero shooter Project Ethos, an extraction game with a minor 'roguelike' twist

2K Games has finally joined its competitors: It has a hero shooter. (Aside from the defunct Battleborn, that is.) The company flew a few dozen streamers (and me and a couple other press) to LA this week to unveil Project Ethos, an upcoming free-to-play competitive game that it's calling a "roguelike hero shooter."

It's not really a roguelike: You just get to pick from randomized sets of buffs throughout a match. Otherwise, it's a third-person shooter that resembles Fortnite, but with hero characters who come with unique guns and abilities, and a low-stakes PvPvE extraction mode as its main attraction.

The last surprise new hero shooter I previewed was Concord, and although I thought it was alright, things didn't go great for that one (there are rumblings of a comeback attempt). But unlike Concord, which was announced just a couple months before it went on sale for $40 and immediately tanked, Project Ethos is still in "early" development, according to reps from developer 31st Union, and will be free-to-play. A public playtest is starting today, with access granted via Twitch drops from streamers at the event, and there was lots of talk about listening to player feedback during development.

There's a good amount here for a game in "early" development (which actually started five years ago with a small team), and I spent several hours playing it yesterday. My favorite of the six available characters was Prism, who can peer through a ring of light that marks enemies and buffs her sniper shots, as well as briefly cloak. I also liked Arbor, who alternates between healing and area-of-effect poison attacks.

"Evolutions" earned during a match (these are the "roguelike" randomized upgrade choices) can, for example, cause Arbor's poison attacks to also heal allies, or add a speed buff to his healing ability. The idea is that, when the stars align and you're offered and select the right set of upgrades, they'll synergize for epic builds, as in a game like Risk of Rain 2. Except, as a PvP game, Ethos can't get too wild about its buffs, so I'm not sure it'll ever evoke the same feeling as an infinite Slay the Spire combo.

In the primary extraction mode, called Trials, my trio hustled between PvE events, which award items like weapon and shield upgrades in return for doing simple tasks or fighting robots, as well as Cores, the resource we were trying to extract with. We engaged with other trios often, fighting when we both ziplined into the same event area, or just because we happened to cross paths.

If your team successfully reaches an extraction point and survives the usual countdown timer area defense, you'll leave the match with a bonus, but when my squad was wiped we still took home Cores, which can be spent on permanent player upgrades. There's also no losing your weapons like in hardcore extraction milsims, or acquiring weapons at all, since the characters have unique primaries and secondaries.

Extracting doesn't seem all that important, then, so it's a bit like playing a battle royale game with no winners, and yet I did feel victorious when my team made it out alive, and when our performance score jumped from Bronze to Silver. The other mode we played, called Gauntlet, is a mini tournament where the goal is to win three rounds of team deathmatch before you lose three. I liked that format more, but I also liked Concord's more arena-shootery aspects, so, you know, I'm not sure TDM is going to help Project Ethos draw Fortnite or Apex Legends or Overwatch 2 players away from their chosen games.

The movement and shooting are both alright. I wanted a double jump—I don't know if it'd make it a better game, I just wanted it—but made do with jump pads, and you can slide and glide and there are ziplines. The guns are interesting enough. I like that the vanilla assault-rifle-and-grenades guy has a small twist: Rather than the usual pistol, his secondary is a single-shot rifle that takes a couple seconds to charge before firing.

The extraction map may be the weakest aspect of Project Ethos—unmemorable—and the randomized Evolutions are a neat little twist, but it remains to be seen if they're anything more than that.

But this isn't the launch, it's just the announcement, as the developer reiterated at the end of the day. The first playtest starts now, and will run through October 20, with the servers live from 11 am to 11 pm PT over the weekend. The only way in is by watching Twitch streamers who are playing the game. You can find a list of them here.