A year after extraction shooter The Cycle: Frontier was shut down, it's back—well, in Fortnite at least

A year after the extraction shooter The Cycle: Frontier shut down for good, Yager Development has brought it back—sort of—as The Cycle: Prospect Island, a new island in Fortnite that aims to keep «the spirit» of the original game alive.

The Cycle: Prospect Island emerged from experimentation with Unreal Editor for Fortnite by a handful of Yager developers, most of whom hadn't worked on The Cycle: Frontier. «While they were aware quite early that not everything that made TC:F shine can be brought into this project, they brought as many ideas and visuals back to life as feasible,» Yager wrote in a blog post (via Game Developer). «This was not a big project within the studio, but the result is definitely something that you should check out.»

Gameplay in The Cycle: Prospect Island sounds similar to that of the game that inspired it. From your base in Prospect Station, you can accept contracts from three factions—Korolev, Osiris, and ICA—that will send you down to Prospect Island below, where you'll hunt Striders, collect loot, and do whatever's required to complete your mission. Other players will be doing the same thing, and won't necessarily be friendly about it, and you'll also have to deal with the storm that pops in occasionally to complicate things further.

Complete the job and successfully evacuate to Prospect Station, and you'll keep all the loot you were able to haul out; die before you make it to safety, though, and all your gear will be lost, although your contract progress will not be reset. Completing contracts will enable you to level up, unlocking new gear and, eventually, a «faction class.» Regardless of your success or failure on that front, you'll also earn Fortnite battle pass XP while playing the game.

It's not exactly a comeback of The Cycle: Frontier, but it's close, and it's an interesting and novel way for a studio to preserve, as Yager put it, «the spirit» of the game. It may not satisfy committed fans who want nothing short of a full-fledged