Earthfall is "a modern version of Left 4 Dead"

Earthfall launched via Steam Early Access in April last year and developer Holospark has quietly been working on completing the game, applying chances based on feedback and porting the experience over to the console versions.

We caught up with Holospark CEO Russell Williams at PAX East in Boston to learn more about the game, described as a "modern version of Left 4 Dead" and its development. Here's what Williams had to say about what sets it apart from its inspiration.

"It's a modern take on Left 4 Dead. Unreal 4 engine, update graphics, the conventions of modern shooters like aim down sights, things like that. But a couple of the big things that we do is we have barricades where you can actually put up fences where you can go through, but the aliens can't. You can put up turrets and automatic turrets, so you can sort of like control the play space a little bit, cause you know they're going to be coming fast and furious."

"Second thing is, it's aliens. And why did we do aliens instead of say zombies? It's because I love Left 4 Dead, but I put hundreds of hours into it, but it was always fighting those zombies from one place to another. And we wanted to have a little more of a story and a reason, so with the aliens... we can introduce new aliens, we can have you develop new weapons based on the alien tech. So it gives us places to keep evolving the story and growing the game."

Williams hopes to expand the game post-release (scheduled for this spring) with new content.

"We would love to keep building and expanding this world. So that's our hope that we'll be successful enough, and people will come play, and we will be able to continue building out this world for them."

Earthfall is available on Steam now (Early Access) and the full launch is planned for PC, PS4, and Xbox One sometime this spring.