By John Walker on March 5th, 2008 at 3:25 pm.
Whatever happened to Heavy Duty? The planet-defending action strategy looked interesting, but then developer Primal Soft’s website fell silent. And has been for nearly two years. Out of nowhere, a new trailer has appeared.
We can always trust you to defend our planet, Gametrailers.
The game was originally due to appear this time last year, but obviously it didn’t show up. Now publishers Akella Games are boasting it once more. It sounds a really intriguing idea. Your task is to defend a planet (albeit quite a small one if the zooming in the video above is accurate), starting with a squad of men charging about in stompy robots. The original Heavy Duty website goes on,
“You’ll create a planet-wide defensive system to intercept and destroy alien spaceships before they land, and if they manage to slip to the surface of your planet – it’s up to you to lead the elite group of robots to crush the invaders, gather some artifacts, research them and produce even better weapons. You’ll manage your own base and build new ones.”
If you want bemusing, then the feature list on Akella’s site offers this:
“Reverse kinematics mean the end of scripted animation and make sure that characters interact with the world on a believable level.”
At last an end to those damned kinematics going forward. Ok, I’m probably revealing my ignorance here, but whatever it means, I reckon it sounds important.
Anyhow, the bit that sounds properly interesting about this whole project is this one:
“Engage the enemy in multiple ways from dogfights in the skies with UFOs, to ground-based cleanup operations after wrecked UFOs crash planetside as well as the whole-scale assault of alien bases or the defence of your own.”
Let’s just hope they release it this time.
05/03/2008 at 15:40 AbyssUK says:
Bonus points for the extra blue skies I say!
05/03/2008 at 15:42 GibletHead2000 says:
Maybe they mean ‘Inverse Kinematics‘?
Certainly looks like it has potential though. Dare I say it looks like it might even have some Battlezone-style aspects? Which would be great.
05/03/2008 at 15:53 Jim Rossignol says:
Bonus points for using a sample of some dude singing, “Heavy Duty! H-h-heavy Duty!” in the trailer.
05/03/2008 at 16:00 Okami says:
This looks fun.
05/03/2008 at 16:04 Jonathan says:
Looks like a cross between x-com (ground based ufo attacks, global scale) and Hostile Waters (get ship, build ship, fly.).
I don’t know about you, but I’d give it one(t).
Somehow the texture pop up makes me more optimistic. To me it says “We know this game needs to play smooth to work and we know that a bit of graphics cheating never hurt anyone.” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oDHDyPCHZko if it still has the stuff shown in this older trailer then consider me smitten.
05/03/2008 at 16:05 Fat Zombie says:
That looks rather awesome, I find.
05/03/2008 at 16:06 Dracko says:
A cross between two great games, then?
It does seem to have something going for it.
05/03/2008 at 17:47 Stromko says:
Probably troubled development, and Akella publishing it doesn’t fill me with hope. It could be good, but there’s also strong odds it’ll be a buggy, incomplete mess. I like what I’m seeing but I’ve seen too many games fumble in development.
Best not to get hyped about this until there’s something concrete or playable or reviewed by a reputable source. They can’t all turn out like STALKER.
05/03/2008 at 17:58 Veloxi says:
This looks totally like something I would play. :)
05/03/2008 at 18:41 Turin Turambar says:
I think the air combat from this video is only a small part of the game. The main thing is the vehicular land combat, most of past trailers had some robot spider thingie as the main protagonist.
Like this
http://en.akella.com/Files/Games/24/heavyduty_16.jpg
05/03/2008 at 18:49 Shanucore says:
Looks good fun, but dear oh dear that music leaves something to be desired.
05/03/2008 at 23:53 Caiman says:
Whenever I see smooth transitions from space to planet and back again, I wonder when David Braben is going to finish Elite 4.
06/03/2008 at 05:07 Andrew Doull says:
The best earth to space transition video is for Infinity: the Quest for Earth which you can see here. And given RPS’ recent fetishisation of single developer built massive games, I’m surprised that the game hasn’t received more coverage.
06/03/2008 at 06:01 Seth Tipps says:
Does that look a lot like SPORE to anyone else? And by a bit like, I mean it looks like a really creative SPORE patch. Was the art design always that similar? Or are these the first glimpses?