Rock, Paper, Shotgun

By Kieron Gillen on August 12th, 2008 at 10:53 am.

Having seen this a few days ago in a PlayTen press-release, I decided not to post about it due to a lack of information… but it’s been nagging at me, so I will, if only to have We Talked About It First bragging rights. It’s Burut CT‘s forthcoming game The Wall. It’s not due until late 2009 – and looking around it’s been mentioned since at least 2006, though the only contemporary screenshot is the one at the top of the article – but it still screams of the sort of imaginative, oddball demi-mainstream game we’re only really seeing from Eastern-European/Russian development right now.

In short, it seems to be a kind of a first-person revolutionary simulator, like a cross between Syndicate and Rockstar’s not-very-good State of Emergency.

It appears – and you’ll note I’m using “appears” a lot, as I’m basing this of a three short paragraph press release – to be an open-world game, in a city undergoing violent revolution provoked by ecological disasters (Which is a tad unfair to the poor old Government, I guess, but hey, any riot’s a good riot). You clearly want to get involved in this mass action. And you can, thanks to the key feature of being able to both provoke and control these mobs of people.

(Which is where the whole Syndicate thing comes to mind.)

There’s also a little of Mirror’s edge – despite being first person, the combat is primarily hand-to-hand based on “authentic martial arts-moves”. I’d be fine with a broken bottle and the old glasgow-kiss, admittedly. There’s also many of the usual open-world features you’d expect – hijacking of vehicles, public transport, etc. Oh – and the somewhat intriguing mention of using the “global surveillance system”. Which you have to hope is something more than just game-developer for “map screen”.

It’s running on Emergent’s Gamebryo engine which you’ll best know from Oblivion and Fallout 3.

So yeah. Not due until December 2009. Virtually no details. And yet still… this one certainly has potential. I’ll be watching for any information as it develops.

And until then, here’s a completely extraneous Tilly and the Wall video.