It’s safe to say that competitive FPS games are my bread and butter, but even I’m astounded (and pretty concerned) at just how many are in the pipeline at the moment. The live service landscape is notoriously hard to break into, yet the new projects just keep coming. Well, here’s the next contender that’s looking to disrupt the status quo: Spectre Divide, a free-to-play tactical shooter that will rival the likes of Valorant and CS2. However, don’t go thinking this is just an imitation. While there is certainly some familiarity to Spectre Divide, it also has some surprising new tricks up its sleeve.
The first thing you need to know is that Spectre Divide is the debut game from Mountaintop Studios, which has former Riot, Respawn, and Bungie alumni among its ranks. During my time at a preview event for the upcoming FPS game, it became immediately clear that many of the studio’s senior figures are connected by their admiration for Counter-Strike.
As is the case with most round-based tactical shooters, there is an inherent CS-ness about Spectre Divide. It’s main game mode revolves around bomb planting and defusing across two sites, with one attacking team and one defending team. While different aesthetically, the map design will also feel familiar to Counter-Strike fans (and Valorant players, too). There are buy phases before each round. And yes, there’s an AWP-like sniper for all you deadeyes out there.
However, Spectre Divide shakes things up in a big way. At its core is a mechanic called Duality, and I can’t understate how impressed I am with its concept and its early execution. Spectre Divide is a 3v3 game, but each team has six characters. Yes, Duality lets you control two characters at the same time.
Using a puck that you can throw around the map, you can summon the inactive character (known as your Spectre) to its location, and with the press of a key, you can switch bodies and take control. There is no limit to how many times you can switch between your two characters, but the time it takes to switch will increase depending on how distant they are from one another. What this also means is that if you get picked off by an opponent, you’re not immediately relegated to spectating your teammates – you get a second chance at changing the outcome of the round.
I’ve seen plenty of gimmicky mechanics over the years in FPS games, and I was initially concerned that that this would be another. I can assure you, having tried it myself, it isn’t. The really mind-blowing thing about Duality is that it serves so many purposes, and I think it’ll be appealing (in differing ways) to both tac shooter novices and FPS veterans.
For the former, Duality gives you second chances and more time during matches to hone your skills. Before you push a site or peek a lane, throw down your puck somewhere nearby, and if it doesn’t work out, you get to try again.
For the latter group of players, it can be used for strategic recon or intelligent outplays. You could, for example, bait out a push on A with one character, and immediately switch to your second character over on B for the actual attack. Or, if you’re defending, you could park your Spectre on the opposite bomb site, and it will alert you to any nearby players. Or you could throw your puck up to high vantage points you can’t normally jump up to. Or you could cover your own cross and pick up your own trades by keeping them in a strategic place nearby. As you can see, it’s super versatile.
Duality is the game’s big marketing hook, sure, but it is also a genuinely fresh, multi-layered new mechanic that can both make tactical shooters more accessible and help create a high skill ceiling. I know that we hear similar sentiments from pretty much every new FPS game these days, but this feels like the real deal.
Another interesting aspect of Spectre Divide is how it sits in an ideological middle ground between the raw, gunplay-focused action of CS and the ability-stuffed, hero shooter vibe of Valorant. While there aren’t specific heroes to play as, you do have to lock in a Sponsor for each match. Sponsors come with a free piece of utility and two more abilities that can be purchased between rounds. However, there are no ultimate abilities. I definitely got the sense during the preview presentation that game-changing ults were seen as sacrilegious by many Mountaintop devs, and that’s something game director Lee Horn talked about with me in a post-preview interview, too.
“For us, [abilities should] increase your chance of winning a fight, versus being the thing that wins the fight. We actually tried ultimates, we played with them for a good while in development. We found that they’re really fun for the user… but it’s not so fun as the victim to be on the receiving end.”
Another noticeable difference is that the traditional, hipfire gunplay you see in tactical PC shooters has been switched out in favor of a focus on ADS shooting. You can still fire from the hip, but it won’t be as effective as aiming down your sight. There is no movement penalty of any kind while ADSing in Spectre Divide, and there is “true-to-crosshair accuracy,” according to Mountaintop. Maybe this will upset some tac shooter purisits, but from what I played everything felt super slick, gunplay-wise.
So, all of the core nuts and bolts of Spectre Divide are solid and satisfying. Things are looking good. But of course, any new multiplayer game – especially a free-to-play one – needs to think carefully about rolling out seasonal content and monetization.
“For a lot of us, this is not our first live service rodeo,” Horn tells me. “So we’re building a lot of the pipelines now. A good chunk of our team is actually working on seasonal content and post-launch stuff – cosmetics, gameplay features, even back end services to just make updating smoother. So it really is getting into the mindset that [launch day] is not the end, it’s like the start.”
In terms of how Spectre Divide is being monetized, Horn says there is nothing “pay-to-win [or] pay-for-power.” There are only three things you can spend money on – character skins, weapon skins, and the ability to unlock Sponsors without grinding for them through gameplay (something I personally think does creep into a separate ‘pay-to-get-an-early-advantage’ category, but it is admittedly a practise that is commonplace in most class or hero-based shooters these days). I will say that with the game’s distinctive, cel-shaded art style there’s definitely scope for some creative and striking cosmetics here.
So, all in all, I am massively impressed with Spectre Division already. Everything gameplay-wise seems tight, it offers something that feels innovative in the genre, and Mountaintop is at least saying all the right things about supporting the free PC game at this early stage. I want to play more of it, and I’m sad that I can’t right now – that seems like a mission accomplished.
The truth is, regardless of what I tell you right here and now about Spectre Divide, the odds will be stacked against it when it eventually launches – that’s the case for any new FPS game, it just comes with the territory now. So I can’t tell you whether this is going to be the next hot live service shooter, or whether it will unsettle the big dogs like CS2 and Valorant. But what I can say with confidence is that Mountaintop is giving it the best possible chance, and Duality is a core mechanic that feels genuinely fresh in a space where that’s becoming increasingly rare to find.