A fairly different beast from Magicka, Showdown is a multiplayer-only 2.5D game that’s all about the action, whether it be gun heavy frag fest or more ninja-style knife kills, the whole ‘point’ of the game is to get people to fight, and to get them to fight epically. It’s not going to be a huge game by any means – a £7.99 price point and a total of eight-players means that, just like their last game, this is a product aimed at providing small bouts of light, yet extremely amusing fun. The game isn’t even in ‘pre-alpha’ yet, so what we’ve seen so far is only really a proof-of-concept, but still it looks impressive.
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| Going down? |
The team are mainly focusing on the combat and movement mechanics, with rolling and dodging being very fluid and very over the top. We’re told that concepts like Bullet Time and the classic epic-dive through windows are what they hope is going to be a norm, and the game is going to really work on the fundamentals of platforming controls. From our limited experience with the game so far, they seem fairly responsive – one touch of a button has you diving and rolling all over the place and it’s very easy to shoot, move and jump all at the same time, whilst also making your mum a cup of tea.
At the moment, there are two main ‘settings’ which provide the theme for the levels – Neo-Tokyo is a modern-day setting, with everything you could imagine and there is also a medieval England setting which is meant to evoke films like Robin Hood. Whilst you can take modern weapons into this second setting via your loadout, the only weapons you’ll be able to find on the ground are swords and crossbows, so once you run out of ammo you better flex your melee muscles. We’d argue it would be better to separate the two time zones – so for modern settings you use modern hero archetypes and weapons, and then for the medieval settings you use appropriate stuff there, but we’re sure it’ll be fine.
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| Sure, why not have some jet packs whilst you’re at it |
There’s also only two main game-modes at this point – Showdown which is the typical team deathmatch where two teams of four players face off against each other, and apparently there’s going to be a second type of mode as well where you have to steal things. We’re not quite sure how the latter mode is going to work, but ‘Showdown’ mode is easy enough to figure out. Arrowhead are hoping to design the levels so that there are natural focal points for both teams, where most of the action takes place. This would make it easier to instigate the slowdown effect etc… that they want to put in as it would be a local phenomenon and easier to design in.
There’s still a while to go before this game will make its première debut – having learned their lesson developing Magicka, we expect this to be a much more polished experience from the get go. Arrowhead have already said that they want to support this through themed DLC, although we imagine it won’t go much beyond new themed arenas, characters and weapons. We also don’t see them lingering much either, as there’s also apparently a third project which they would really like to see get off the ground, and they’re only a small studio, but we’ll see. Plenty of ‘lolz’ to be had here though, and we can’t wait to get our hands on a more complete version. The Showdown Effect is coming to PC and Mac sometime during Q4 2012.
Most Anticipated Feature: See how the game plays when you have all eight people duke it out in one place.
