Pioner is an open-world MMORPG set in the anomaly and bandit-filled island of Tarterus. There is a lot to see and do here, so grab your gun, pack some food, and a detector, and let’s head out to explore this unknown land.
Each area has a host of points of interest to explore and loot around. Here you can get materials and new gear to help you progress in the game. From the logistical center and stronghold for the Brigade Faction in Tradeburg, the Ark, which serves as the home base for the Conglomerate, to the City of Narifon, which is home to the Runners Faction. Apart from these faction hubs, there is the Wandering Pass, a neutral territory where the holiday events take place. Lastly, there is Tsemnegorsk, a massive city located south in the Midlands.
Each area has its own set of anomalies and enemies for you to deal with. There are some similarities between areas, but they each have their own variations. This helps them feel less like cookie-cutter enemies and something fresh from zone to zone.
To help combat them, the game gives you two types of tools: weapons to fight the local population and a detector with tin pieces to help you deal with the anomalies around the island.
Let’s talk about the first: your weapons. There are plenty of weapons in the game, ranging from sniper rifles, submachine guns, assault rifles, and all the way to a simple dagger. Each weapon is fun to handle and simple to use, each with its pros and cons when using each bit of your arsenal. Shooting feels solid with great reload animations and a general weight to each shot.
You can also customize your weapons with different attachments, each helping to make the weapon more efficient at what it does. And if you start to run low on ammo, you can either scavenge some from the world or use the ammo machines found in settlements, which can give you a free refill to your current gear every hour.
The second tool is a detector and pieces of tin shaped like a capital E. The detector will beep as you get closer to anomalies, letting you know when you are getting too close. And the tin can be thrown to temporarily deactivate them, giving you a safe path to cross. While a basic idea of just throwing a tin can may not seem like much, it simplifies something that could be overthought and unintuitive, and allows you to progress with the real meat of the game.
There are world events that pop up from time to time that help break up the pace. This gives you something to do between quests and exploration. World events vary from type to type, with a decent range of activities to tackle. From defending refueling stations from an onslaught of enemies to preventing tied-up hostages from burning up in flames, there are several others that present something more than just constantly holding down the trigger.
As you explore and progress, you will eventually level up your reputation, which gives you a point to spend on perks. There are seven or so trees to go through, each with perks that affect combat, crafting, scavenging, or trading. As always, this is a part of the game that flavors the type of player you want to be.
Pioner is a PvPvE release with more PvE than PvP at the moment. The main areas of the game are PvE, where you fight the AI enemy to gain loot and experience. The PvP aspect of the game is where the best loot in the game is, but there are only two ways to get it. You ether have to fight in the Shadow Lands, or win matches that you can access from the pause menu.
The visuals are quite nice, and despite the supernatural element to the game, the world and feel of the game’s aesthetics are fairly grounded. This helps make the world more immersive and fun to play in. With a current rig of a Geforce RTX 3070, 32 GB of ram, and an Intel Core i7-12700Fthe game runs quite smoothly. It takes a bit to load, but I can chalk it up to the server being quite far from me.
There is a wide range of enemies for you to fight on the island. The most basic are the bandits; they are the most abundant, right next to the fallen, which are basically zombies, some with magic properties. There are also abominations that are mutated dead that explode upon death. Next, there are robots ranging from flying drones to ground bots with saws. Then there is the infected wildlife that range from dogs that charge you, worms that can burrow and shoot at you, and giant spiders that lunge at you to try and bite you. So if you have arachnophobia and are afraid of man-sized spiders, you may want to steer clear of this one.
Now, as the game is still early in development, there are still a good number of bugs that happen to affect my game from time to time. I have had my gear disappear on me, chests that gave no loot, and text not in my preferred language. Even syncing with my friend has failed a few times, as I have been desynced from them and placed in different servers on the same map.
There are also some UI and quality of life improvements that would help make the game a little easier to understand. But even then, the game definitely shows great potential and is still a fun time to play. I look forward to seeing how PIONER grows and develops, and seeing what kind of new features the devs have in mind.