Surgent Studios has revealed its next game: FixForce. Sticking to the studio's pattern, FixForce is completely different from what Surgent has done before--unlike grief-driven metroidvania Tales of Kenzera: Zau and surreal first-person horror game Dead Take, FixForce is a chaotic cooperative game in which you play as a team of robots charged with repairing a post-post-apocalyptic world.Designed for up to six players, FixForce sees you and your friends each take control of a robot and do your best to complete repair jobs within a time limit. Viewed through first person, you primarily complete assignments with a tool that allows you to telekinetically pick up, rotate, and throw junk or machine parts scattered throughout the environment to solve environmental puzzles. Your tool can also affix items to others, allowing you to construct makeshift bridges, ramps, and towers to aid in exploration.To confound your team's efforts, each of you spawns in with a battery representing your health, and hazards will chip away at that health if you're not careful. You can't survive being in water, for example, and occasionally enemy bots will latch onto your character's chassis and begin sucking away your battery. Allies can help you--making a walkway for you to get out of a pool you accidentally fell into, for instance, or pulling off the energy-sucking enemy bots and tossing them away--but they can harm you too. With a simple click (purposeful or by mistake), you can push an ally off a ledge to their demise or steal their battery to power something you need.When you die, you retain control of your robot's head, which pops off your body. If an ally can recover your body and reorient it, you can hop right back on and keep playing with your already drained battery. Otherwise, you can choose to explode and respawn with one of your limited lives, your battery replenished.Who is assigning your crew these repair jobs? Why are all the humans apparently gone? What apocalypse occurred in this post-post-apocalyptic world? All of that remains unknown. And it's unclear whether the game will attempt to answer those questions or leave them purposely vague to instead focus on making the experience more of a party game. Based on Surgent Studios founder Abubakar Salim's comments, however, I'm inclined to think the latter.In a press release, Salim said, "We saw the pure chaos and hilarity FixForce unleashed as it came together, so we made the decision to move quickly and publish it ourselves. Yes, FixForce is completely unlike anything we've ever done before, but look: we made one game about grief and another about abuse and thought, 'Can we have a little bit of silly, stupid fun for a second?’ I promise we'll go back to dark and depressing after this."I played a bit of FixForce alongside GameSpot managing editor Tamoor Hussain, lead producer Lucy James, and senior producer Kurt Indovina. I thought it was fine, though a bit unpolished--which makes sense given the game is launching in early access and will presumably continue to evolve and change post-release.Still, unless the game drastically changes, I don't think I'll be giving FixForce another chance. While far more mechanically simple and narratively approachable than Surgent Studios' previous projects, FixForce feels a little too kid-friendly for what I want from a co-op game. I could see myself using FixForce as a way to introduce my toddler nieces and nephews to a "more complex" video game when they're older, but this game doesn't seem to offer enough variety and complications to its formula to make it a go-to option for my friends and me.So many of FixForce's problems seem to boil down to: find broken machine, find part you need, bring part to machine, make a bridge/ramp to next machine, repeat. And while I think there is a way to make that formula interesting, I did not see evidence that that would be the case during the hour-long preview. And without the same narrative juice that Tales of Kenzera and Dead Take had, I'm worried FixForce won't be able to hold my interest in the same fervent chokehold.No way to know without a bit more time with the game, of course. FixForce launches in early access via both Steam and the Epic Games Store on March 12. The full release is scheduled for later this year, as is a console release on Xbox.