Cellar Door knows a thing or two about beautiful combos
If there’s a genre of games that doesn’t require much thinking, it’s brawlers. Those games typically ask that you punch and shoot everything on the screen, and then move forward to do it again. Subtlety and nuance and strategy are not its fortes; finding a baseball bat and then hitting someone with it is hardly a mentally-tasking gameplan.
Cellar Door, the developer of 2013’sRogue Legacy, has a take on brawlers that it says will make you “rethink what a brawler could be.” That’sFull Metal Furies, a game that supports four-player cooperative play both locally and online. It’s coming to PC and Xbox One sometime this year.
The hook toFull Metal Furiesseems to be that it leans on asymmetrical play from its four heroes as a means to methodically attack the opposition. For instance, some enemies might have barriers that one hero needs to eliminate before the others can join in the fray. That’s hopefully an overly simplistic example, though; it’s hardly an original idea.
Another major bullet point is that two characters can be selected for solo play. They can be switched out on the fly, to make use of different combinations of abilities. Also, one can revive the other if they go down.
Other systems inFull Metal Furiesare: RPG mechanics for leveling up the heroes, blueprints to further customize their style of attacks, and secret puzzles (we don’t yet know the point of these). Cellar Door says that it’s probably 15 to 20 hours in length, and about as difficult asRogue Legacy.
The rest of the game’s broad outline can be seen on theFull Metal Furiespageof Cellar Door’s site. We’ll have to wait to see if this is the sly subversion that it’s said to be. Right now it seems like a stylish brawler with some neat mechanics — but probably not something that will make us rethink a genre that hardly requires any thinking in the first place.
