Veiled Experts was a 5v5 based Third-Person Shooter by the Japanese Nexon company. The game released in May 2023 into Early Access and has now in December 2023 only half a year later been shutdown. I know Veiled Experts players don't like to hear this, but the game has clearly been heavily inspired by Hi-Rez 'Rogue Company' game. Which is pretty funny, since Hi-Rez also has a reputation of taking a lot of inspiration from other games, while also putting their own Hi-Rez spin on top of it.
I also want to make clear, that Veiled Experts is by no means a scuffed Rogue Company Clone game. In fact, Veiled Experts is actually pretty high quality and not scuffed at all. It is a good-looking game, that doesn't have to shy away from a comparison with Rogue, some even prefer the style of Veiled. The gameplay was also pretty good. Movement felt very smooth and you could easily sideroll or vault up surfaces. Gunplay is probably the biggest difference to Rogue, while it might look similar on first glance, there was a lot more recoil with a lot of weapons in Veiled. Nonetheless, I never felt it was unfair and I also enjoyed this gunplay approach. There was also a pretty good variety of weapons in the game. Pistols, SMGs, ARs, Shotguns, Bows, Snipers, you name it.
Something that Veiled did pretty well, was also the fact, that all characters were unlocked from the start, which is quite unusual for Hero-based Shooters. Games like Rogue Company, Apex Legends or Rainbow Six Siege usually require you to either grind the game, or cash in, in order to unlock characters, but Veiled just gave players access to all of them. Of course this on the other hand also took away a bit of the grind motivation to unlock characters, that a lot of other games have, where you feel like every match helps you to progress towards a goal. Nonetheless, I liked this player-friendly approach by Veiled.
I mentioned that Veiled Experts is a Hero-Shooter and I am referring here to light Hero-Shooters, similar to Rogue Company or Apex Legends, where Shooting is 90% of the gameplay and the hero ability is just a nice bonus, in contrast to heavy Hero-Shooters, like Overwatch or Paladins, where the hero abilities entirely determine your playstyle. While talking about Heroes, the characters in Veiled Experts were fine. Most of them didn't seem particularly memorable, but maybe that's just because I discovered the game too late to get familiar with all of them. That being said, characters like Young Sik, Kyle, Nicki and Lily Rose did remind me of certain Rogue Company characters, either based on looks or abilities. My absolute favourite however was obviously Jack, who was total John-Wick Knock-Off, so I always called him 'Jack Wick'. Shameless imitation or not, it was an awesome character. So why the hell not?
Veiled Experts had two gamemodes: Bomb Defusal and Team Deathmatch. Both are absolute classics and there is nothing wrong with them, but it is not much in terms of variety. Unfortunately the game also had only a couple of different maps. I have a hard time finding concrete information about how many there were exactly, but it can't have been more than 6 or 7. This would have been fine as a starting point, but it is a bit low overall.
The whole shutdown of the game generally feels a bit weird. The game actually has a pretty respectable foundation in terms of gameplay, artstyle and so on. It just feels, like Nexon expected to hit the ground running and be a massive success on Day 1 or immediately shut the game down. They could have really added some nice content updates on top of this solid foundation, but it feels like they never really tried and just gave up instead. If you want to be massive success from the start or to slowly build you playerbase, you do need some kind of marketing. I never saw anything for this game. It was a complete coincidence that I stumbled upon this game on the video of a fellow Youtuber, who showcased undervalued F2P games. I heard that Nexon sponsored a single game session with Shroud to promote this game. Paying streamers is fine, but that can't replace classic marketing. Veiled Experts probably failed, because few people even heard of it.
Result:
Veiled Experts was one of these actually good games, that few people have even heard of it. I liked the gameplay and artstyle, but the game unfortunately did lack content and bit of polish. More maps and gamemodes and possibly a console version, could really have helped the game and who knows where it would be in a year from now. The way it went, Veiled Experts was only a promise, that will never live up to its full potential.
7.3/10
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