Titanfall-inspired Empulse has a free demo for Steam Next Fest

Empulse is a promising shooter, but it has a long road ahead

Just one year after the disastrous launch of Splitgate 2, 1047 Games is tossing a Hail Mary with Empulse. The multiplayer shooter, which currently has a free Steam Next Fest demo, looks to recapture the magic of the original Splitgate but in a Titanfall-inspired movement shooter. It’s a decent enough elevator pitch, but one that becomes very complicated from a studio whose reputation is teetering on the brink of oblivion.

The good news is that 1047 Games has a stable foundation to build on. After playing a handful of matches, I’ve found that Empulse is a fast and expressive shooter that cuts straight to the fun without the burden of modern live service game design. That’s a good start, but the real challenge will be convincing those who have been burned by bungled Splitgate launches to trust the studio one more time. There isn’t room for errors this time, and that’s scary for a game launching into early access after one year of development.

Empulse is a 6v6 shooter that draws heavy inspiration from Titanfall, Call of Duty: Black Ops 3, and (surprisingly enough) Portal 2. It’s a straightforward multiplayer game where you shoot your rivals in old standby modes like Team Deathmatch, with some slight variations along the way. What’s most important is that the no bullshit shooting is fun enough to support any twists. 1047 Games knows how to make an arcade-style shooter, and Empulse has the same strengths as Splitgate. Guns are casually satisfying to fire off, but there’s a lot of strategic depth to getting the jump on your opponent.

In Empulse, you do that not with portals but through a fluid movement system that’s immediately fun to toy around with. You can sprint, slide, grapple, and wall-run. (And wall-run backwards.) All of those abilities can be chained together. Every time you’re killed, it’s a good excuse to try out a new route toward the opposing team. What I’ve always loved about Splitgate is that you don’t have to be the best shooter to win; you can outsmart a technician with spatial reasoning. Empulse pulls off that same trick with movement, once again putting an emphasis on positioning above twitchy skill.

There are two twists to all this. The first is mechs. Fulfilling the dream of underserved Titanfall fans, players can get into a giant robot during a match and rack up kills. It functions like a power weapon rather than an alternate form; you get some time in the cockpit to let your chain gun and rockets rip before the enemy team guns you down. You can activate a shield to protect yourself for a bit, and jump on enemies to crush them. Like the core shooting, the mech has a casual, arcade feel that’s easy to control. It’s more of a momentum-swinging gimmick than a tool with strategic depth, but that works for the kind of game Empulse is.

The second twist is paint, an idea inspired by Portal 2. Playing the role of a grenade or gadget, players can equip a throwable paintball with its own unique effect. One creates a bouncy surface to give players extra height; another creates a healing circle for anyone standing by in the splotch. It’s a fun little alternative to your average secondary weapons, adding a little color to the battlefield.

Those battlefields really need the color, because the art direction of Empulse isn’t all too interesting in its early form. My matches mostly took place on rooftops and sipping yards filled with flat gray surfaces. They don’t necessarily look like piles of unfinished assets, but it’s one of the places where you can tell that Empulse was rushed out the door. It feels like 1047 Games’ philosophy is to get the geometry right first and worry about the details in early access. I can understand that if it’s the case; the maps give me plenty of surfaces for me to run across and chain to with my grapple. The maps lack character, but they work as jungle gyms for now.

There’s plenty that feels like it’s destined to be tweaked throughout early access. At present, the time to kill feels lightning fast. There’s no time to get away from an enemy once they open fire, even with the movement options available to you. That’s exacerbated by some early weapon imbalance. Shotguns, in particular, feel wildly overpowered considering that they can kill you from fairly far away. There’s work to be done, but that’s the point of an early access game: It’s something you build with a community.

That’s where Empulse’s situation gets dicey. 1047 Games is historically great at making shooters, but very bad at launching and maintaining them. Splitgate fans have been burned multiple times over the past few years as the studio has struggled to crack a live service model. At Summer Game Fest, 1047 Games CEO Ian Proulx told me that the team is taking steps to correct its past failures. For instance, Empulse will be a $20 game with no microtransactions when it launches into early access on June 24. That’s penance for Splitgate 2’s notorious launch filled with expensive skins. There’s a sense that 1047 Games is trying to get back to its roots here with a multiplayer game that’s just fun to play, rather than a compulsive habit. In theory, that should help it reclaim some good will and grow the community it needs. Maybe we can all just forget the last year and treat Empulse as a hard reset.

Still, it’s not going to be that easy. Head over to the Titanfall subreddit, and you’ll find a community that’s already skeptical. A thread titled “Can we ban Empulse posts?” is full of frustrated Titanfall fans accusing 1047 Games of trying to astroturf its game. “It's abundantly clear that 1047 have just been using this subreddit to market their new game, despite it having only tangential relation to Titanfall,” the post reads. At the time of writing, it has 1.2 thousand upvotes. That’s not the kind of feedback you want to see from your target audience.

The reality is that 1047 Games isn’t going to be able to force a hit. Splitgate’s breakout success was natural, born from years of 1047 Games refining a good idea until players caught on. Splitgate 2 was a hard contrast, with Proulx trying too hard to manufacture excitement through cheap publicity stunts. Empulse will need to earn trust back the old-fashioned way: by letting a fun shooter speak for itself.