Arcen Games are primarily known for making interesting (and ugly) strategy games, but last Wednesday, August 24th, the small team released 3D dino-vs.-robots action game In Case Of Emergency, Release Raptor into early access. Then on Saturday, August 27th, they announced they were unreleasing it. Now as of today the game is no longer on sale and refunds are available for those who already purchased it through Steam.
In Case of Emergency, Release Raptor has been released, which means there must be some kind of emergency. Perhaps the title of the game is a commentary on the situation of creators Arcen, who have been making inventive, weird strategy games for years, and found themselves in financial troubles earlier this year. Upsetting news, because not only were Arcen’s games great, their longevity as a company seemed like evidence that such an unusual portfolio could sustain a studio.
Raptor may or may not be the solution. It’s in Early Access now and it looks as odd as the title suggests.
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.”
Less than three months ago, AI Wars developer Arcen Games ran into financial bother that left the majority of their studio jobless. Now, they’ve announced their first 3D game – “the first of many”, they say – named In Case of Emergency, Release Raptor [official forum]. Previously, Arcen planned to build a fully-fledged 3D survival game and while this isn’t it, it will see the team “working on building the components for that larger game by building them into a smaller game (this one) first.”
Arcen Games, developers of AI War and most recently Starward Rogue, are going to let go almost all their staff this coming Monday. Company founder Chris Park explained in a post on Arcen’s site that that sales of their latest game had been much lower than expected and that sales of their back catalogue had dried up, perhaps as a result of changes to Steam over the past year.
Burning out on making Stars Beyond Reach, Arcen Games announced a few months ago they were putting the 4X strategy game to one side to focus on a roguelikelike they’d been toying with for a while. That game, named Starward Rogue [official site], is now here. It’s a top-down shooter with oodles of bullets to dodge and bosses to battle, about mechs exploring a mysterious structure stuck in the side of a star. It’s colourful!
Ooh, and to celebrate the launch, their 2013 tactical turn-based mech ’em up Bionic Dues is free if you grab it now. Have you played it?
Have You Played? is an endless stream of game recommendations. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time.
Nick Cave once murmur-sang about his lack of belief in an interventionist god. Not a Populous man, then, Mr Cave. All those pillars of flame and the constant terraforming are sure signs of direct interference by celestial pests. Perhaps he’d be more comfortable with Skyward Collapse [official site], a God game in which you must maintain balance by nudging. You do intervene, but quietly. Nick wouldn’t even notice you.
