I am getting absolutely stomped in Spectre Divide, the just-revealed 3-on-3 online shooter from a new game studio staffed by talent from Oculus VR, Valorant, Apex Legends, Halo Infinite, and more. I am not good at this free-to-play PC game. But I can’t stop thinking about how I might get good — by intelligently swapping between two bodies to outmaneuver my enemies.
If only I’d placed my doppelganger here instead of there, I could’ve had my own back. What if I had teleported my clone behind enemy lines to flank them while I drew their attention elsewhere? Maybe if I’d planted the bomb with one body while camping that door with the other, I’d have caught them unawares?
I’ve never played a shooter like this before — even if, at first, it looks and feels an awful lot like Valorant.
It’s been four years since Mountaintop Studios started building its 70-person fully remote team, raising $60 million and attracting a number of popular streamers along the way. (Twitch star Michael “Shroud” Grzesiek became the company’s lead gameplay adviser for the past year or so, though Mountaintop won’t say if he’s also committed to streaming it.)
After that wait, I was initially disappointed to see it might just be another hero shooter with anime-inspired graphics like Valorant and Overwatch. But not for long, because Mountaintop’s first game doesn’t actually have any heroes or Valorant’s “I never knew what hit me and now I’m sitting out the round” Ultimates. Instead, Spectre Divide gives you two bodies, so, at a minimum, you get a second chance after your first gets wiped out.
“One big thing we’ve solved in tac shooters is sitting and watching,” says director Lee Horn.
Intriguingly, there’s an in-universe explanation for the twin bodies: nobody is dying in this game. You’re competing in Santai, a relatively bloodless bloodsport where a former military technology called Duality lets players inhabit a pair of empty spectre avatars — “one mind, two bodies,” Mountaintop likes to say.
The game is set in a city called Breakwater, where the sport is popular enough that corporate sponsors have gotten involved, contributing gear (grenades, echolocation pings, vision blockers, traps, and more) that take the place of the abilities you’d have in a hero shooter. Here’s a quick gallery of the options on day one:
Each round, you pick your sponsor, decide how much cash to spend on weapons, armor, and abilities, and either attack or defend in the bomb defusal mode that Counter-Strike popularized nearly 25 years ago. Only now, you’ve got two bodies per person.
Frankly, it’s a lot for a newbie to keep track of. You’re always temporarily leaving one of your two bodies behind, and it’s not always easy to tell what’s happening back there. You do get a “Spectre Warning” Spidey-sense if your distant self hears enemy footsteps, but it can be a huge risk to go check. When I quickly teleported back to help my second self, it meant leaving my first self out in the open to get destroyed. When I spent time safely squirreling away my first self, I was often too late to save my second.
But when you get it right, and properly coordinate with your human teammates and their own other selves, the plays feel great. You can have your entire team cover bomb site A and bomb site B simultaneously by splitting your forces, teleporting to whichever set of bodies is under attack. You can fake an attack at one bomb site, then switch to the other without running across the entire map — just warp into your other body, then throw the “puck” that gradually teleports your first body along for the ride.
You can rush with all six spectres, reinforcing yourselves by teleporting your spectre forward as you press the attack. (My favorite piece of gear so far is the Dual Amp, which lets me rush down foes by teleporting my clone to my location and improving its rate of fire simultaneously.) But if foes know you’re coming, they can reinforce themselves the same way. This is a game where a player can camp and actively attack you at the same time, so be prepared for that.
You’ll also need to prepare for foes who can head-shot you instantly without skipping a beat or pump nearly every single bullet they fire into you should their headshot miss. One of the biggest ways this game is not like Valorant is that aimed shots are always accurate. If you click a mouse while the targeting reticle is on a head, that’s where the shot will land.
While hip fire is not accurate beyond close range, the pattern that bullets will spray when you’re aiming down the sights is almost always the same, making it critical to memorize the spray pattern of your weapon and move your mouse accordingly if you want to win face-to-face firefights.
While this might sound great to competitive gamers, I don’t have time to maintain that skill; even as a young adult, the day I personally stopped playing Counter-Strike was the day I tired of getting instantly head-shot by the damn AK.
That said, Spectre’s dual bodies and gadgets mean I don’t always have to fight head-to-head. I can flank, provide covering fire, heal, shield, distract, and snipe with my own spectre to cover me. There’s value in not rushing in, particularly when a round is already lost: saved weapons and armor carry forward to the next round if you don’t die. A team that buys decent weapons every round won’t be able to afford devastating ones later if they keep getting gunned down (or bombed) in the process.
Spectre Divide doesn’t have a release date yet, but the UE4 game already feels fairly polished. The game ran incredibly smoothly on my midrange PC (with RTX 3060 Ti graphics), and my colleague Tom Warren said it barely hit his GPU at all. It currently uses BattlEye anticheat tech, though the company says that’s just the starting point.
It’s only currently planned for PC, with no controller or console plans yet — and Mountaintop won’t necessarily allow Steam Deck to join. “Steam Deck is a concern as a cheating vector, and I think our anti-cheat systems may block it right now,” Mountaintop CEO and cofounder Nate Mitchell tells me.
The game will launch with four maps, with additional ones coming in seasonal updates, and only the single bomb defusal game mode to start. There also aren’t immediate plans to add more weapons since Mountaintop wants to “let the meta settle” and do a balance pass first.
Mountaintop will be publishing the game itself on Steam, and it’ll be free to play, funded by the cosmetic weapon skins and character customization parts you can buy, plus new packages of “sponsor” equipment you can also get by grinding. The company says they’ll be priced similarly to other games. Weapons will be free: “We’re committed to the fact that Spectre Divide won’t be pay-to-win,” the company writes.
Mountaintop says Spectre Divide will be available for the public to play in closed beta soon.
