“Introduce a little anarchy, you upset the established order and everything becomes chaos. I’m an agent of chaos” – The Joker.
Ever doubted that the Joker’s bizarre anarchistic ideologies could really exist? If so, try spending 10 minutes with Wildfire, the inventive reverse-city-builder from new indie development outfit, Dot Product.
In those 10 minutes, you’ll come to realise that an ‘agent of chaos’ fuelled by no motive other than simply watching the world burn isn’t actually that far fetched an idea. In fact, watching an established order smash and burn itself to the ground under your influence can be a disturbing amount of fun. Morally questionable, yet highly enjoyable fun! [Joker laugh]
Inspired by the oppression and austerity driven riots throughout the world , Wildfire, currently in alpha testing, presents you with a beautifully crafted cardboard cut-out London and gives you one simple task – inspire the paper toy society to destroy absolutely everything. To do this, you must “plop” a little activist into the world and watch him corrupt the state and spread the anarchy.
At it’s most basic level, Wildfire is set up as a simulation game. The game gives you a single “agent” to place anywhere within the city, who you can then watch attempt to turn other citizens into rioters by touching them. Much like a giant game of group tag/zombie infection, your one activist will soon become a hundred strong as each infected citizen goes on to infect a bunch of others in a Fibonacci sequence.
SOE’s Planetside 2 has finally arrived, fixing the free-to-play MMOFPS crown in its sights.
The persistent war torn online world allows hundreds of players to fight against each other in a continuous online gaming experience. These matches don’t last for 15 minutes – you’re in chaotic battle for days or even weeks on end, using quad-bikes, tanks and fighter jets to take over continents on the planet of Auraxis until your empire owns the planet. This is a game that truly requires team-play to succeed, despite a current issue with some troll players translating the term “friendly fire,” to “lol, spawn kill my own team”.
You may remember in August, in our Pick of the Projects, we picked out Project Giana, a platformer by Black Forest Games.
The games protagonist is Giana, a young girl stuck in a dream world where she can collect gems and evade monsters before proceeding to the next level.
The core gameplay mechanic is Giana’s ability to switch form, cycling from ‘cutie’ to ‘punk’. Cutie Giana is able to twirl and float down from jumps, increasing her air time, whereas Punk Giana is able to dash around like a fireball, moving quickly and killing monsters with ease.
When Giana changes form everything in her dream world changes too; the music, the appearance of the enemies, and even the terrain around her morphs to represent her new aesthetic. Punk Giana has a more guitary score and the monsters are less menacing (as she is more powerful).
Painkiller was an FPS hit on release back in 2004, which was followed up by the favourably received Battle Out Of Hell expansion in December of the same year. All was looking good for the promising new franchise, until it took a 3 year hiatus and decided to come back with the abysmal 2007 release, Painkiller: Overdose.
Developers “The Farm 51” are making an effort to bring the ageing splatterfest back into the public eye with Painkiller: Hell and Damnation – an up to date remake of the original outing. A modern remake of an old classic? Painkiller: Hell and Damnation. HD. Clever. The game, which is now in a closed beta state, is much more impressive than their wordplay.
The beta currently features the full first level, the Graveyard, and it’s quite the treat for fans of the older, more over-the-top shooters of the nineties and early noughties, like Unreal and Doom.
As a remake, it doesn’t really stray from the formula established in the original Painkiller. You star as Daniel (the protagonist), who is thrust into a series of linked arenas and has to butcher all comers with a delicious smorgasbord of weapons, laying waste to the denizens of Purgatory and Hell. Thankfully, Farm 51 don’t seem to be repeating the mistakes of Overdose by making plot a priority – the beta doesn’t currently contain any cutscenes or exposition at all. With any other game this would be a mark against it, but Painkiller is about splattering various undead and demons apart. On that front, it delivers.
Topware Interactive have today announced the creation of a website for upcoming twin-stick shooting/colour matching game Transcripted, offering a hugely updated version of the 2 year-old game of the same name.
Framing itself as a nightmare scenario in which a new, unknown virus is threatening to destroy the entire human race, Transcripted is an interesting blend of two wildly different yet immensely popular aspects of casual arcade titles – the Twin-Stick Shooter and the Match-Three Colour Puzzle.
Players are tasked with taking command of the nana-probe – a tiny drone that can penetrate deep into an infected person’s body – and wage war directly on a new and terrifying virus enemy. To do this, the probe first turns its weapons upon the many tumorous masses the virus sets on it – this being the twin-stick portion of the gameplay. You’ll face foes aping many of the genre’s mainstays, such as enemies that will ram you or fire set patterns of bullets. After vanquishing a few of these, the colour matching comes in. As enemies are destroyed they release coloured blocks, the same as the ones that are continuously streaming along the top or bottom (depending on the stage) of the arena. You then pick these blocks up and fire them at the streaming blocks, hoping to match enough to defeat the virus.
Yesterday Perfect World Entertainment, the developers behind in-development free-to-play MMO RaiderZ, dropped a bevy of new screenshots alongside a new dev video; going into detail about how players can spend their downtime.
While the bulk of RaiderZ is obviously about slaying huge, fearsome beasts there’s also a wide variety of other things to do in between epic clashes – yesterday’s Rest and Respite dev diary went into a few of the things players can get up to.
Even when the topic is resting up, action in RaiderZ is never far behind. Even when talking quest rewards battling comes into play, with devs discussing how drops and parts scavenged from dead foes are essential to building an arsenal to be an even bigger threat to the local wildlife.
Next up is the subject of mounts. A mainstay of MMOs for years to be sure, but RaiderZ is promising some important changes to stand out. First, mounts will be customisable and second, they can actually be used in combat; typically granting the player a stronger first hit and quick initiation on the foe.
“Introduce a little anarchy, you upset the established order and everything becomes chaos. I’m an agent of chaos” – The Joker.
