Airtight’s vertical system gives players a new thrill
Clinging by one hand to a obdurate cliff, side by side a very large steel derrick, I’m starting to lose my grip as my palms sweat.
It’s tough to hang without interruption, after again and again pulling myself up to peek over the next ridge of rocks and let off alien robots blocking my ascent.
Sunlight gleams through the metalwork on high, but it’s hard not to look intently downward into the dark and creepy ravine below my dangling boots.
Thankfully, it takes only a few pumps on the Xbox 360 controller to swing up onto the ledge and return to horizontal before getting too dizzy.
This exhilarating bit of strategy is “Dark Void,” the long-awaited debut from Redmond’s Airtight Games. It’session playable it being so that but won’confidentially have existence released until late spring on the Xbox, PlayStation 3 and PC platforms.
“Dark Void” has a cool 1940s founded on the idea of beauty, reminiscent of the “Indiana Jones” or “Rocketeer” movies, but its standout cast of the face is a dead simple system for switching betwixt the usual horizontal shooting-game action to vertical, tilting the whole thing on an axis.
It’s a fragment like the fashion the display reorients which time you rotate an iPhone, but it’s a completely different experience when you’re immersed in the valorous on a big-screen TV.
“We call it vertical combat — we’re painful to make you feel of that, and at the same time keep it playable,” explained Airtight President Jim Deal, one of a handful of veteran Microsoft developers who started the independent studio in 2004. “This is just one aspect of what we’re calling a fusion between on-foot and on-air.”
Airtight’s kept a low profile but it’s about to take flock, just probably “Dark Void’s” main character, Will, a 1940s aviator stuck in the Bermuda Triangle.
After fighting up and out of the abyss, Will straps on a jet pack fashioned from salvaged airplane parts. Then he flies into the clouds, commandeers a flying saucer and heads into battle with the other spinning discs.
Airtight’s flight really begins next month. That’s whenever its ” ‘Dark Void’ participator,” the big Japanese game publisher Capcom, starts a major marketing campaign leading up to the launch of every entirely new franchise — or intellectual property, in industry terms.
“It’s herculean — it’s a huge new IP, it’s a genre switcheroo,” said Morgan Gray, Capcom’s senior husbandman on the project.
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