The Kickstarter for Overload, the 6DOF shooter being developed by a team headed by the creators of Descent, appears to have floundered. It's raised nearly $170,000 to date, which is a nice chunk of change but not nearly close enough to the $300,000 goal with only three days remaining on the clock. To help get things going, the studio has released a publicly-available “playable teaser,” or as we used to call them back in the day, a demo.

The teaser begins with an emphasis on the fact that it is not in fact a demo, noting that Overload is still in a pre-alpha state, and is thus not optimized and may occasionally crash. But the developers do refer to it as a demo in the Kickstarter update announcing its release, and so that's what I'm going to stick with.

“We've put this demo together in a hurry, and though we've done as much as we can to make it perfect, it still has some rough edges,” the update says. “And of course we're still very early in development—we're showing off a few sample levels and some cool weapons and robots, but there's lots and lots more to come.”

I gave the demo a quick spin, and it's quite good for something that's been thrown together as a last-ditch attempt to save the crowdfunding campaign. It's very Descent-like, and not just in the way that so many 6DOF shooters tend to be, but in the environmental design, the enemies, and of course the way I got turned around and lost numerous times on my way to dying just before the end of the freakin' level: My Descent career in a nutshell, in other words.

The update includes links to 32-bit and 64-bit Windows versions of the demo, and there are apparently Linux and Mac tests as well, but they're locked behind a backers-only update. The Overload Kickstarter comes to an end on March 11.