Children of Morta [official site], the pretty hack-and-slash that hit Kickstarter in 2015, is coming out for real in the first half of next year. It’s about the Bergson family, adventurers that guard Mount Morta and take it in turns to leave the house to hunt for loot and slay monsters. Read the rest of this entry »
This War of Mine [official site] developers 11 Bit Studios recently announced their next game, Frostpunk, but they weren’t quite done with This War. To celebrate the Sims-y survival game’s impending birthday (it’s Monday), they’ve launched a new free content update. Expect a new ending, new NPCs, and more as your rag-tag group of civilians try to survive in the warzone. That’s a cheery little end to this laff riot of a week. Read the rest of this entry »
This War of Mine developers 11 Bit Studios are returning with another grim survival scenario to ponder how much we’re willing to give up our humanity etc. This War of Mine’s modern-day-ish setting was inspired by the Siege of Sarajevo, with regular people trying to get by in a war-torn city, but 11 Bit are going a bit more unreal with their next. Today they announced Frostpunk [official site], set in a frozen world with steam-powered technology. I’ll tell you one thing about morality in this hard world: I’ll devour the first nobber I see wearing a top hat with goggles.
This War of Mine’s [official site] take on resource gathering and survival leans heavily on its setting – a besieged city caught up in the horrors of a modern war – and The Little Ones expansion, now available on PC, Mac and Linux, turns the screw by adding new playable characters and NPCs. They’re the titular little ones. Children. You might start the game as a parent, or find children hiding from danger, alone, or have them approach your shelter looking for safety and security. Once you’ve taken them in, you’ll not only have to protect them from harm, you’ll have to make an effort to understand the world through their eyes.
Long before they spawned a SWAT FPS spin-off, Sierra’s Police Quest games were big on police procedure, often with deadly consequences if you didn’t play by the book. Beat Cop [official site], an adventure game announced today and due to launch at the end of this year, may let players write tickets and tow cars but… I wouldn’t get your hopes up for obsessive procedure. Inspired by ’80s cop shows (not the most formal, that lot), Beat Cop is about a former detective framed for murder and busted down to a beat, trying to clear his name. Might be an interesting one, this.
This War Of Mine [official site] is a sobering experience. Like most of us, I’ve never been involved in an actual war, thus any knowledge I have regarding the atrocities of conflict has been accrued from modern media. This War Of Mine may be a fictional, video game take on these realities, but its Sims’-esque slant on war zone resource management delivers something which, at the very least, feels real from a position of relative ignorance.
Update 1.4, named “New Beginning”, adds Steam Workshop support, meaning players can now share the scenarios they invent in the game’s editor suite.
RPS Feature The Grims
There are several ways conflict-from-the-civilian-perspective effort This War Of Mine could have gone. Maudlin, shoegazing dialogue piece; inappropriate And One Shall Rise hero saga; icy-hearted death toll calculator like Plague Inc or DEFCON. What I didn’t expect was The Sims During Wartime.
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What a left turn This War of Mine is. 11 bit studios previously made the markedly un-serious Anomaly games, festivals of tactical explosions, air-strikes and all the other hoo-rah wargasms we’re generally exposed to. A sombre survival game exploring the vulnerability of civilians trapped in warzones wasn’t where I would have pegged them to go next.
These twists on the formula are where I’m finding my interest in survival games peaking. As Pip pointed out in her interview with senior writer Pawel Miechowski, it’s taking what zombies have long been a metaphor for and going literal. Now 11 bit have announced we’ll get to be war-torn on November 14th and thrown a trailer into the mix as well.
RPS Feature A war game with a civilian focus
“An experience of war seen from an entirely new angle”. That’s how 11 Bit Studios are pitching This War Of Mine. The new angle they’re referring to is the fact that, instead of being an action-packed military shooter, their warzone is a city under siege and requires you to keep a band of civilians alive. Its desire not to glorify war reminds me of Ubisoft’s recent Valiant Hearts but in terms of how the game works mechanically it’s closer to Zafehouse Diaries – a zombie survival game with a diary storytelling element. I spoke to the game’s senior writer to learn more.
RPS Feature I'm gonna let it shine
This War Of Mine is a game set in the ruins of a wartorn city. Rather than playing a soldier on either side of the conflict, as is traditional in the world of games, players control a group of civilians who are trying to survive in a place where the essentials of life are thin on the ground. The game doesn’t match its mechanics to its theme as smoothly and powerfully as Papers, Please, instead opting to tread unfamiliar ground in familiar shoes. It’s a resource management game, in which survivors craft, explore and scavenge to survive. I played through the first few days and discovered the irony of it all.
Published by 11 Bit Studios (Anomaly, This War Of Mine) and created by ‘a mysterious one-man dev team’, Jameson The Pilot is Elite, except you’ll be looking at the life of your spacefarer from a bird’s eye view. Except the term ‘bird’s eye view’ doesn’t really make sense in space. Obviously, I’d love to see a flock of pigeons trying to guide themselves through the cosmos, or just a single vulture, but they wouldn’t be the best place to hang your camera. Jameson is a top-down space sim, in which the player can take on all manner of roles, from pirate to space-bus driver. I hope that the world is at least as robustly simulated as that in the glorious Space Rangers 2. Trailer below.
DotA burst forth from the Warcraft III mod scene with a mighty roar and a shower of blood, each drop growing into another independent MOBA, but tower defence games were a more creeping success. Oh sure, they’d been around before, but they bred madly in that weird environment then escaped into the wild. And, much like DotA, what’s followed has never really strayed far from the original formula. 11 Bit Studios played with flipping it in Anomaly: Warzone Earth, controlling soldiers fighting through alien fortifications, but couldn’t resist the lure of tower defence forever.
Its newly-announced Anomaly Defenders is a reverse-tower offence (or a reverse-reverse-tower defence) with the radical idea of building static defences to ward off advancing enemies.
“In war, not everyone is a soldier.” That’s This War of Mine‘s tagline, and while you wouldn’t know it from playing videogames, it’s definitely true. 11 Bit Studios is designing a game around that idea, with a core focus not on mowing down every gun-toting, evil-mustache-twirling ultra-terrorist in your way but instead on simple survival. You control a group of a civilians in a wartorn town, and the rest, well, that’s up to you.
‘Anomaly’ remains a word my brain doggedly refuses to spell right, but fortunately the little red squiggly line in my word processor always knows what to do. One day we’ll hire that guy, or girl. We’re equal squiggly opportunities here, you know. ‘Anomaly’ is also the first word in the name of the upcoming sequel to 11-Bit Studios’ inverted tower defence game, Anomaly: Warzone Earth. The sensibly subtitless Anomaly 2 arrives in just over a fortnight, on May 15, and while we usually don’t post about preorder incentives because it’s a slightly different weapon or a stupid hat or just being bullied by the man in Gamestop, when it’s a free extra copy of the game it’s rather less slight, stupid or bullying. It’s still bloody preordering, of course, and you wouldn’t preorder a car. You wouldn’t preorder a handbag. You wouldn’t preorder a television. You wouldn’t preorder a movie. Actually, people probably do pre-order all those things, don’t they? Political correctness gone mad, I call it.
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RPS Feature Alomany amnalomy alimony aargh
The greatest horror to befall popular culture in the last decade is not Michael Bublé, as is commonly believed. It is another Michael B entirely, and one infinitely more dangerous. Michael Bay’s Transformers movies were, somehow, some of the biggest box-office grossing movies of all time, you see. This means a generation of young and/or money-hungry creators are convinced that the path to riches is to include spiky metal insecty things with pallid neon bits invading cyan-hued American cities, accompanied by a boomy orchestral soundtrack. We’ve just seen it in Crysis 3, and now 11-bit’s tower-defence-in-reverse sequel Anomaly 2‘s at it. It’s not right. Why can’t game artists be inspired by Czech animation, Swedish architecture and Fleetwood Mac instead? I’d play the hell out of a game about asymmetrical clay bears trashing Malmo while Go Your Own Way plays.
BUT ANYWAY. Bayisms aside, the four levels of early Anomaly 2 code I’ve played suggest good things, building upon the RTS aspect of the tower-dodging action.
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Do you remember when 11 Bit Studios opened pre-orders for a game before telling anyone what the game was? Today is the day of the actual announcement, so for anyone who did pre-order, can we have a drumroll please? In fact, hold the drums – let me limber up the old saliva gland and prepare my flute for action. Sit back, listen up and prepare yourself for the grand reveal. Oh, cock, I gave it away in the headline didn’t I? It’s Anomaly 2, a sequel to the tower-defence-in-reverse game that Jim enjoyed back in the day. Trailer below.
As we’ve often said before, pre-ordering is a publisher ruse designed to get people to pay for games before they can be warned if they’re no good. Just think how great all those lucky people who pre-ordered Aliens: Colonial Marines are feeling right now. 11 Bit Studios, the indie team behind Anomaly Warzone Earth are taking the concept from the ridiculous to the ludicrous. You can pre-order their next game for 50% off… until they announce what it is.
Anomalies are so named because they go nom nom nom and eat everything that investigates them. It’s true! Something else that’s true is that tower-defence-but-in-reverse game Anomaly: Warzone Earth now has a demo out, and you can get it here. Jim got on well with Anomaly, calling it a “novel idea, well-presented… well-executed”, and even comparing it to Defense Grid. I’ve spawned some footage of the game itself after the jump.
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11 Bit Studios’ clever (and budget-priced) tower-defence-in-reverse game, Anomaly – Warzone Earth, is out today! The concept and presentation look neat, but is it a towering inferno, or a creepy cinder? What does that mean? I just don’t know. I’ve been up all night playing videogames. But that won’t let stop me telling you wot I think…
Last week I went along to see the first game from 11 bit studios, the new independant developer that’s made up by a collection of ex-CD Projekt staffers. The first thing the gentleman demoing the game did was apologise for the game’s title- Anomaly: Warzone Earth. The second thing he did was explain that it was a tower defense game, which he didn’t apologise for. That’s because Warzone Earth is a tower defense game that you play… in reverse.
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