Overload

The gameplay of the game is similar to the Descent series. The player is tasked with controlling a gunship in zero gravity inside a variety of mining facilities and cave areas, fighting hostile worker robots (called autonomous operators in the game) and finding possible survivors in cryostasis tubes. Every level has an objective to complete, with most levels carrying over the traditional goal of destroying the reactor powering the facility and escaping before the reactor meltdown destroys the entire facility. Levels may also feature alternative objectives, such as destroying every hostile robot in a level, destroying a boss or simply finding and reaching the exit.

The game in its core is a first-person shooter with a fully three-dimensional environment, but with six degrees of freedom movement in zero gravity, allowing the player to move and rotate in any direction, which demands spatial awareness skills from the players. The enemy robots share a similar movement model. To assist in navigating around the level, the player can call up a Holo-Guide, a holographic bot that can lead the player to a destination (similar to the Guide-Bot of Descent II), and a fully three-dimensionally rendered automap, based on a similar feature seen in Descent, showing the areas of the level that the player has already discovered or spotted. In order to progress in most levels, the player is required to collect access keys to open doors to access further areas. The levels also contain a variety of secret areas behind camouflaged doors, some of which may be locked and require a puzzle to be solved in order to unlock them.

The game begins in 2118 with a multi-purpose service vessel (MPSV) approaching Ymir, one of the moons of Saturn. The vessel, called Iberia, is registered to Cronus Frontier, a colony located on the moons of Saturn that was established eleven years prior by Juno Offworld Automation, a corporation working in the space industry, of which Cronus Frontier is a subsidiary. The colony consists of the outer moons of Ymir, Tarvos, Skoll, and Phoebe, Titan, and the inner moons of Tethys and Enceladus. The outer moons are mostly uninhabited mining installations on the fringes of Saturn’s orbit.

Saturn’s largest moon Titan houses the majority of the colonial population along with the astrophysics, manufacturing, particle physics, metallurgical, and administrative operations. Lastly, the inner moons of Tethys and Enceladus hold the colony’s secretive advanced research and gas mining operations, respectively.

Members of Revival Productions, the studio behind the game, include founders Matt Toschlog and Mike Kulas, who started Parallax Software, the company behind the first two Descent titles, as well as Luke Schneider from Radian Games.

The development for Overload started out as an idea to create a tunnel shooter for the 20th anniversary of the release of Descent, with the idea slowly shifting into that of a 6DOF game with virtual reality support and eventually into a Descent-like game. The project started with Mike Kulas, Matt Toschlog and Luke Schneider in an email discussion, with Schneider being the one to come up with the name Overload. In September 2014, Toschlog announced to former Parallax Software employees about the project and the establishment of Revival Productions. While the project was put on hold for some time, it continued as Chris Claflin, a former artist at Volition (one of the two companies Parallax Software originally split into), joined the project.

When the game was first announced, it was described as a 'spiritual successor' to Descent and Descent II. On release, the game received positive coverage from Rock, Paper, Shotgun and Engadget, with Dominic Tarason of the former calling it "very good".

Metacritic states that the game received "generally favorable reviews". 4Players praised the music as well as the level and sound design, while criticizing the lack of variety. GameStar was less positive, criticizing the repetitive gameplay and the excessive difficulty of the later levels.