Standing among the pinnacle of tactical team shooters is Spectre Divide, an upcoming team-based competitive 3v3 tactical shooter that brings some unique twists to the genre. As the inaugural title from Mountaintop Studios, the team has a lot to prove if they want to be recognized alongside Valorant, Rainbow Six Siege, and the granddaddy of them all, Counter-Strike. In an exclusive three-hour presentation, we got hands-on with Spectre Divide ahead of its initial reveal.
As the meta for first-person shooters continues to evolve among a growing number of titles, a team of five or six players pit against each other remains a core tenet of so many of these games. Here, there are still six members of a crew to each side but with a unique twist that hasn’t been properly pulled off in another shooter to date: each player controls two heroes at once.
Now, there won’t be any split-screen hijinx or transitioning between worlds like The Medium. What Spectre Divide offers is the unique mechanic of Duality, a body-swapping mechanic that allows players to swap into their partner Spectre character at a given time. When not actively controlling the second character, they’ll remain on the lookout and be able to provide real-time feedback when another player approaches. Other than this, the inactive Spectre will remain a sitting duck and can easily be snuck up on by a player who is mindful enough to slowly walk up behind them.
To balance the act of juggling two bodies at once, the ability to swap into a player’s second Spectre takes time the further apart each character is from the other. Both teammates and enemies alike can see a spark run across the ground as a character's mind shifts into their second body. Players can also redeploy their Spectre in a better vantage spot by throwing out an infinitely reusable puck that draws the Spectre into wherever it lands (also subject to the same timed delay). This mechanic can be used to get a player up onto a vantage spot or across a choke point without needing to run out into the open.
The concept of Duality makes almost everything in Spectre Divide require two separate halves to create a singular game experience. Players will customize both of their champions individually and in the preview build I got my hands on, things like outfits and cosmetic accessories were limited to only one Spectre at a time. This meant no matching tracksuits or Afros and sunglasses for the pair. The same goes for weapons: aside from the initial buy round, where players are limited to pistols and a few hundred bucks to their name, the in-round shop appears limited to forcing each champion to pick a separate weapon. Granted, this may be a smart quick-pick system at play here and there may be a way to pick which weapon to buy for each warm body manually, but I couldn’t decipher the full breadth of tactics during my few rounds with Spectre Divide. For much of my experience, I settled on a combination of heavy machine guns with a massive clip size for laying down suppressing fire into a choke point accompanied by some semi-automatic sniper rifles for longer-range engagements.
True to its Counter-Strike lineage, the core of the team composition lies in the Buy section that begins each round of play. Players start with a limited pool of cash that grows each round based on individual performance, both good and bad, to purchase weapons, armor, and grenades for that specific round. Survive the round, and what you’ve purchased or picked up from the ground carries into the next; die, and you’re back to your starting pistol and whatever cash the Mountaintop gods have bestowed upon you to get back up to speed. From there, players explore the tried-and-true CS-style bomb defusal gameplay, with one side actively trying to blow up one of the two bomb sites in a given stage, while the other is tasked with either taking out the enemy team before they can successfully plant a bomb or defusing it before it can explode.
In addition to a main weapon and secondary pistol, players will also have three separate abilities to use that are purchased at the start of each round and thrown like grenades. Rather than building out a champion and selecting these abilities from a wide pool of skills, the abilities are instead given out before each round by allying with a particular Sponsor. Each Sponsor in Spectre Divide grants the player the use of three distinctively different skills that all have their tactical uses. The most basic of Sponsors grants players abilities akin to a flash grenade and explosive while some of the more complex Sponsor kits yield surveillance drones, poisoned smoke screens, and a twin-linked health booster that can restore either your health or the health of a teammate you can move your crosshair over to. With eight different Sponsors available at the launch of Spectre Divide, players will have time to explore what trio to run with will be the most advantageous on the battlefield.
Spectre Divide’s gunplay is insanely snappy and responsive to the twitch shooter. What’s unique to the visceral firefights that Mountaintop Studios is bringing to the competition is something they’re coining “true-to-crosshair” accuracy. For ninety-five per cent of the weapons available in Spectre Divide, that initial shot will land exactly where the player is pointing, even while moving. To balance out the one-hit kill sniper rifles, these weapons do have a very brief cooldown period where the accuracy has to recenter itself after moving. This gives semi-automatic weapons that might not fire very quickly a massive initial shot. With the Duality system, losing your active character a second chance by taking over their Spectre, no matter how far across the map they might be.
Spectre Divide has nailed that initial first impression with a unique twist on the tried-and-true 6v6 gunplay, but it’s only a matter of time before we see if this has the potential to be the next great competitive shooter. The concept of Duality will certainly take some practice to get the hang of, and how the Esports community reacts will be a make-it-or-break-it moment for Mountaintop Studios. Spectre Divide is one of the most fascinating new mechanics to the first-person shooter genre since the inclusion of last-man-standing and battle royale modes.
There’s no release date yet, but Mountaintop Studios has already confirmed that its competitive tactical shooter will initially be PC-exclusive.
