Creative spins on old ideas: Lichdom and Alekhine’s Gun at E3 201
Among the dozens and dozens of titles the PSU team saw at E3 2015, a couple stand out for being creative takes on well-tread genres. I’m not convinced either game has the polish to be essential for every PS4 owner, but genre enthusiasts might find something to like.
The first is Lichdom: Battlemage, a PS4 port of a 2014 PC title that was moderately received. Lichdom casts you as a man (or woman) whose wife (or sister) has been murdered, and the quest for vengeance is on. It’s a first-person spellslinger—your only weapons are the magic spells you unleash from both hands, and the action comes fast and frantic.
The game’s main draw, and what sets it apart from just about every first-person RPG out there, is an intricate spell-crafting system. The spells you use are ones you create yourself to fit situations, enemy types, and personal preference, and the options are plentiful. You start by selecting an element (fire, thunder, telekinesis) and continue with a function. You can target blasts with individual projectiles, spread things out for an AOE effect, channel that element into a constant ray, and more. From there, things broaden even further, with different spell set-ups bearing additional slots (up to 5!) for further customization. Think a thunder grenade that splits into multiple bouncing thunder projectiles, or a laser ray that stuns any enemy it hits.
Challenge is a major focus with Lichdom—enemies move fast and attack with extreme aggression. This is balanced somewhat by your unlimited mana pool—seriously, cast all the spells you want in rapid succession—but you have very little health to work with. This could present balance issues, as I suspect some spell combinations will simply be far better or worse than others, even as enemy types change. The game also didn’t strike me as very inventive in other respects: graphics are merely OK (with hefty aliasing), the story is about as unoriginal as they come, and levels seem constrictingly linear. However, the deeply customizable spellcasting, colorful aesthetic, and frantic action are a refreshing combination in their own right.
The other title we saw with Maximum Games (excluding Loading Human, a Project Morpheus demo you can learn about here) was Alekhine’s Gun, a blatant Hitman clone set during the Cold War and following Russian spy Alexi Alekhine as he works to thwart a German World War III plot
Our brief gameplay demo of Alekhine’s Gun showed Alexi moving about a mansion disguised as wait help. The ability to disguise yourself and access any area was a touted feature, alongside the very open-ended nature of the levels. Apparently, any room, window, and area of this mansion and its grounds is open to players to slowly plan their tactical killing approach, and the game isn’t interested in hand-holding, instead opting to let players figure out the layout themselves, piecing together possible solutions as they go
In this demo, those solutions meant everything from poisoning wine to tampering with a barbecue grill to cause an accident. Thing is, everything from Staged Accidents to open-ended level design has been done before (and often) by the Hitman series. We can’t yet say how the final game will look and play–we may very well get smartly designed levels, intelligent enemies, and the like–but for now, Alekhine’s Gun doesn’t seem to be doing much to innovate upon a tried-and-true formula. Nor is it visually impressive; the game looks like a last-gen title with its lack of detail, to say nothing of drab textures
Nevertheless, we don’t like to render definitive judgment until these games have released to market, and with all things, Lichdom: Battlemage and Alekhine’s Gun may very well appeal to gamers looking for the gameplay niches they serve. Lichdom was especially interesting for its fully featured spellcrafting. Be sure to check PSU for more coverage of these games, targeting Fall and/or Holiday 2015 releases, in the months ahead.