Arcen Releasing Emergency Raptor On Friday

In Case of Emergency, Release Raptor [official site] is very much not the game I would have expected next from Arcen Games. The small studio are known for games like AI Wars, Starward Rogue, Bionic Dues - strange and thoughtful twists on strategy games, puzzlers, roguelites. In Case of Emergency, Release Raptor is a 3D smash 'em up with a velociraptor fighting robots in the dystopian future. Surprising! Raptor was due to launch onto Steam Early Access today but instead it'll arrive on Friday.

For now, you can watch a video dev diary including the line "In a lot of respects it's kind of like a first-person shooter - the raptor is your gun."

That's Arcen's Chris Park showing off the level editor and a shift in camera view. Previously it had a conventional distant third-person camera (which will still be in as an option) but now they've gone for a close-up camera he calls a "first-person view". But if that on-the-shoulder view is a first-person camera, does that mean... we're playing as a little devil on the raptor's shoulder urging it to destroy everything? I am fine with that.

Emergency Raptor is Arcen's first 3D game. It's come at a difficult time for Arcen, following delays, poor sales, and layoffs. Their plan was for Raptor to be a relatively small and quick game built largely from tweaked Unity Store Assets with many systems they could re-use for a later, larger game.

Also, they wanted to make a game where you ran around as a dinosaur smashing stuff.

This three-day delay isn't for any major problems, more tweaking the level editor and polishing a few bits up. For more general mayhem, here's Emergency Raptor's E3 trailer: