Thanks to Tommaso Romanó for the Steam preview key!

Relow is a multi-player first-person arena shooter that promises fast-paced combat on procedurally generated islands. The game is in early access as of writing but does seem to have its core mechanics in place, just universally lacking in content.

There are several game modes in the current version. Free-For-All is where the person with the most kills wins the round. Mod Chaos is like free-for-all but with random modifiers like bigger characters or headshots only. I didn’t enjoy the Mod Chaos mode as much because it doesn’t clearly state which modifier you are on and most modifiers were just annoying instead of interesting. In King of the Island you must stay in a small zone to get points. King Run is all about getting and keeping a crown for as long as possible. Lastly, Pick up the Kills where players drop coins on death and the coins count as points. Some of these gamemodes are a lot more interesting than others (specifically the final three I mentioned were all interesting compared to free-for-all) and while the core gameplay stays pretty much the same, things are mixed up enough to be fun.

A round of Relow is spent jumping around a cluster of randomly generated islands shooting at the other players trying to rack up as many kills as possible within the short time limit of 5 minutes. The game is very fast-paced and keeps you on your toes. Players are relatively fragile and die quickly with short respawn timers. Once the action starts in a Relow round, it doesn’t end until the game is over.

A lot of the fast pacing of the game comes from the player movement. The characters are pretty agile with double jumps and boost that keeps them in the air. The player movement speed is also fast allowing you to sprint around the maps quickly and efficiently. Aside from it being hard to tell when you’ve landed on the ground, the character feels great to control.

Relow is big on customization. There are a handful of weapons to choose from and you can dual wield two weapons at the same time. You can also customize your player model and weapon skins with a ton of unlockable cosmetics. There is a lootbox system but it doesn’t unlock any gameplay advantages and there aren’t any microtransactions.

You can either play up to 8 players in online multiplayer or with bots. There are no dedicated servers and there is absolutely zero player-base, so most of your time in this game would either be with bots or friends if they pick it up with you. Luckily, the bots are pretty competent despite having no difficulty settings, and the netcode for the game is completely fine.

A lot of my problems with Relow come from the lack of content and polish in the UI, visuals, and sound. The UI all works as intended, but is a bit clunky to maneuver, such as no way to search through all multiplayer servers at once, as you can only search by region. Relow lacks some visual polish. Players are sometimes too bright to see at a glance (white characters on bright blue backgrounds) and when they are in the air, which is almost always, they just look very stiff. The sound effects in the game are subpar at best, and there’s a noticeable lack of music during matches. At least controls are fully rebindable, and at the time of writing there is no controller support, but that is planned for the future. All this could be changed during the early access period of course, but I’d like to see improvement across the board.

Relow does not have many moral concerns. There is a lot of shooting other players with sci-fi weaponry, but the blocky white characters don’t shed any blood. There is access to a text chat in the top left during multiplayer matches, and obviously usernames can be iffy.

Relow has all the basics down to be a very fun fast-paced FPS game. It lacks polish in most areas, but the core gameplay alone is very promising.