Receiver 2 Gameplay Preview – First Person Gun Simulator

Receiver 2 is, at its core, a first person gun simulator. It wouldn’t be accurate to compare it to a shooter as you do very little shooting. It does, however, offer a more realistic simulation of handling and firing guns.

The game starts you off with a revolver. As you fire the gun and spend all of the ammunition, you have to go through a pretty intricate reloading process. You open the barrel, eject the spent casings, load in new bullets, and then close the barrel. You can manually pull the hammer back as well.

The guns look, handle, and sound pretty great. The only enemies you can shoot are drones. Combat is always tense as one bullet can kill you so each encounter, while infrequent, requires effort.

Moving on from the handling of the guns, the main gameplay loop is actually very similar to a rogue-lite. You have a randomly generated level where the main goal is to collect a certain amount of cassette tapes. If you die, you must start over from the beginning of that level. There are a total of five levels. This may sound short but it does take a while to find all the cassette tapes.

On top of all of this, is a pretty interesting sci-fi narrative. The narrative is delivered in little tidbits here and there through collectable floppy diskettes as well as through audio recordings on the cassettes. There seems to have been an attack, dubbed the “Mindkill”, from an entity known only as “The Threat” that wiped out most of humanity. The Receivers were a group of resistance fighters that knew about the attack and trained their minds and bodies to prepare for it. The attack rendered the Receivers in a comatose state and by collecting the tapes, it’ll bring you closer to awakening.

While the general narrative is pretty interesting, some of the delivery is very ham fisted and may come off as a bit pretentious. The game also has elements dealing with mental health issues but it displays it in such a manner that does not really help in anyway in my humble opionion.

Overall Receiver 2 is a pretty neat game that is a bit rough around the edges but offers some interesting mechanics and narrative.