NewGrounds all-stars reassemble for Nightmare Cops
Give me a fist to build a dream on~
Flash may be dead, but the NewGrounds house style lives on. Nightmare Cops is a newly announced cartoon platform brawler from a team of the flash portal's best and brightest led by site founder Tom Fulp, now working with a new crew after producing the likes of Castle Crashers under The Behemoth's banner. This one looks just as silly, putting players in the militaristic boots of a squad of Psychonauts-esque cops sent in to clean up people's persistent nightmares - and I thought school was hellish enough already.
While Tom Fulp - who remains a co-owner of The Behemoth - will be handling the coding side of things, the art is being doodled by two of NewGrounds' most prolific (and frequently work-unsafe) animators, JohnnyUtah and the unfortunately pseudonymmed Spazkid, with trailer music by zircon, with Oney on general soundtrack duty. Not exactly a crew known for being subtle or especially mature, but they seem like a good fit for a game about punching your way through people's larger-than-life cartoon nightmares.
The teaser trailer above hammers its way through clips at an astonishing rate, and among other things we can see a hellish high-school scenario, someone's dream about turning up to work in his underwear, and some interestingly varied gameplay. There's definitely some big chunky bosses to punch until they don't feel like being punched anymore, but there's platforming too (including a grappling hook), and a 'real world' layer where you drive around town in your nightmare-busting crew's van.
There will be three-player co-op, and at least three (maybe four, if the end of the trailer is a hint) playable characters, fitting the classic brawler archetypes of The Balanced One, The Slow Heavy Dude and The Fast Girl. Combat looks to have a lot of manoeuvrability options, including attack cancelling and air-dashes, which has me hopeful there'll be more depth here than Castle Crashers.
There's no hint as to when Nightmare Cops will be coming out, but we do at least know it's PC-bound, and will be hitting Steam at some point. You can see some of the game's work-in-progress art and animation tests over on the game's official Twitter page.
Correction: This article has been amended to clarify Tom Fulp's role on The Behemoth's games and his continued co-ownership of that company.