At first, the Steam web page for REPO was an off-putting sight; the sport’s key artwork has solely only in the near past been up to date to maneuver away from a macabre-looking emoji leering on the viewer with gnarled tooth and hollowed-out eyes leaking tears. However it solely takes a few rounds to grasp why this recreation has taken off with streamers and multiplayer teams. REPO snatches the core idea of Deadly Firm, the viral 2024 co-op hit, after which provides a number of enjoyable problems. Whereas a lot of REPO feels acquainted, the sport appears like proof that even only a few small modifications to an ideal system can transform the participant expertise and create one thing enjoyable and novel.
Developer Semiwork is a small studio primarily based in Sweden, and essentially the most instantly apparent change was the swap of the long-lasting employees of Deadly Firm with little bean robotic guys. It is a large change to the expertise, and it’s onerous to clarify simply how humorous it’s to perish to some horrible destiny, swap into the sport’s observer mode, and watch your buddies wobble round with their huge googly eyes.
REPO is the Retrieve, Extract, and Revenue Operation: A squad of as much as six enter a scary location like an deserted facility or whimsical college for wizards, loot every little thing they’ll, and escape with each robotic intact. (Demise might be reset if a teammate finds your robotic’s head and brings it again to an extraction level, which is one other good change.)
As quickly as you begin a clip compilation or watch a stream of REPO, the attraction of the robots is instantly apparent. Not solely are they silly-looking, however they’ll shrink their chassis down in a comical method to seem like just a little child bean.
The gameplay inevitably results in clips and memes, which encourage authentic fan-made animations and paintings starring the beloved beans in query.
There are, in fact, evil monsters, like Silent Hill-style mannequins who stumble round on spindly, deadly limbs; a horde of guffawing gnomes; and a blind man with a shotgun and an itchy set off finger. However the actual menace is my teammates, particularly once they’re mixed with the sport’s physics system. Some loot is small and straightforward to deal with; I toss it within the revenue cart and transfer on. Different items are fragile, and even an unintended fumble is sufficient to shatter it into nugatory fragments. Massive items are the worst, particularly in slender corridors. Each time you bump a grandfather clock or grand piano in opposition to a wall, one other participant, or step, you possibly can see the revenue degrade with huge numbers on the display screen.
This introduces a hilarious rigidity; a few of my favourite moments within the recreation don’t come from the map’s scary monsters, however the means of getting super-valuable loot again to the extraction zone. I like to take a seat and watch my teammates slowly try to rotate a cumbersome instrument, snapping at one another each time it slips right into a door body, everybody doing their greatest to work in a methodical trend. Then, the aforementioned gnomes make their approach into the loot cart and begin smashing issues, or a large, monstrous beast lurches down the corridor, and every little thing descends into chaos.
The monsters in REPO aren’t as instantly deadly as their contemporaries within the style, however they supply fixed strain and attention-grabbing problems. A run could possibly be going nice, till a teammate succumbs to a Spewer. These nasty little guys connect themselves to a participant’s face, distorting their voice. What’s worse is that they’ll trigger the participant to shoot acid streams of vomit. This excretion can be utilized offensively in opposition to different monsters, or it could possibly land on the loot cart, decaying every little thing inside and inflicting 1000’s of {dollars} of property harm. That is fairly dangerous, particularly as a result of the crew can’t get again on the ship till they meet their quota.
REPO launched on the finish of February, and the sport has loved an “overwhelmingly optimistic” rating on Steam, with over 80,000 opinions on document. The sport’s high clips on Twitch embody streams in many alternative languages. REPO remains to be in early entry, however Semiwork has shared it’s engaged on the sport’s first content material replace, and followers are experimenting with mods within the meantime, like a better participant rely in lobbies or a choice of humorous hats. REPO places a number of pleasant spins on a well-known system, and that has led to it blowing up on streaming platforms and social media this spring.
