Rive Long And Prosper; Die Soon And Admire Explosions

We've not previously covered Rive [official site], the forthcoming 2D shooty platformer from Two Tribes. Who they? They be the Netherlands-based studio behind the rather charming Toki Tori puzzle platform games.

Rive's a quite different proposition from helping chubby yellow birdlets collect eggs: intense and reactive rather than sedate and contemplative, it's a 360-degree shooter in which you help an adorable little robot blast lots of less adorable robots into even less adorable smithereens.

Here's a trailer of people doing exactly not that, preferring instead to get themselves blown up.

Two Tribes haven't released much info on Rive so far, but there are some intriguing tidbits. Among the promised features are collectible hacks that can be uploaded to enemies. Among these hacks is the ability to turn enemies to your cause. That's useful enough, but I'm hoping we'll get some less predictable options too. You could hack one enemy and send it off to nab some Sony passwords, and hack another and force it to dance for you. I'm just spitballing here, folks.

(Fun anecdote: a chap I used to work with liked Toki Tori 2 so much that he would play it during his lunch hour, after work and often during working hours too. Bless him, he'd try and hide the window when he saw me approaching, but it's easy to spot a full-screen Steam game from a distance. Plus after working in an office for a while you develop a sixth-sense for the oh-shit-alt-tab technique people use to hide things they shouldn't be doing.)

Rive is expected sometime in the earlier portion of 2015, for PC and the usual consoles.