ACE Team's Deadly Tower Of Monsters Due In January

I adore the stuttering, frame-stepping animation on the giant gorilla and pterosaurs in The Deadly Tower of Monsters [official site], like stop-motion clay figures brought into an otherwise-smooth 3D video game. That's the point, see: developers ACE Team (them lot behind Zeno Clash, Rock of Ages, and Abyss Odyssey) are framing their shooter as a cheesy old sci-fi movie, so you'll also fight monsters which look an awful lot like stuntmen in cheap costumes. Always got a weird art idea, those folks.

A new trailer is here, also bringing word that Deadly Tower will launch on January 19th:

Oh, yes, and the director is on hand to offer commentary on the film as you play through the game. It's always difficult for something to be intentionally bad as parody without also being just plain bad - look at the innumerable bad parody movies especially - because hey, parodic bad is still bad. Hopefully ACE Team can make the parody funny enough, and the shooty-shooting good enough, to overcome that. The trailer doesn't make the second-to-second run-o-shooting look very exciting, but I'm quietly hopeful. Heck, I'm just glad they're still doing their weird things.

As for that shooty-shooting, it'll have a range of weapons and three different characters with different special abilities: Dick Starspeed, Scarlet Nova, and Robot. Those characters are played by fictional actors too, of course. It's twisting my melon, man.

The Deadly Tower of Monsters is coming on January 19th, published by Atlus. It was originally slated to launch this autumn but, well, it didn't. It'll cost $14.99 or whatever that ends up converted to in real money.