Mirror's Edge meets Mario Galaxy in gravity-defying parkour platformer Telos
Think Spider-Man in space.
Upcoming multiplayer FPS Telos looks incredibly fun in its debut prototype video - which is quite the feat as it doesn't even have anything to fight yet.
What it does have is movement. Glorious, glorious movement. Assuming the role of a four-legged robotic spider, you zip around the playing field in first-person, leaping several stories into the air and cruising around with a grappling hook like the unholy spawn of Mirror's Edge's Faith, Bionic Commando's Nathan "Rad" Spencer, and Crackdown's bouncy super-agents.
If jumping for joy wasn't enough, this early prototype also lets you leap out into the stratosphere and swing around in zero gravity. And if Mario Galaxy and Dead Space 2 have taught us anything, it's that zero-gravity is inherently a good time.
"At the core of any good FPS is the movement system so that's where I've started," said Justin Pierce of the one-man development studio OverpoweredGames. "You play as a large but agile quadruped mecha that can charge to jump quite high and swing around with the help of the grapple hook. One key goal was to make moving in outer space as fun as possible, and yes that means zero gravity as well."
The current graphics are merely placeholder art, but Pierce does want to keep this simple look to some extent. "The art style will evolve over the course of development, but I'm working with a clean low poly style to give what I think is a nice vibrant look," the developer noted on the Telos dev blog.
When asked about a single-player campaign, Pierce explained in an e-mail to Eurogamer that he's not opposed to the idea, but it's not a priority at the moment. "Telos might offer some very lightweight solo activities at some point, but I don't want to be distracted by also trying to balance and design the gameplay around a campaign or story mode," he said. "Every weapon and gameplay element is designed from the ground up for playing against another team of human players and making that experience as fun as possible."
It's still early days for Telos, so a release window is too far off to pin down, but Pierce - who's been working on Telos off and on since 2010 - is aiming to have some sort of playable early build out this year. "The response I've gotten after showing just the movement system has easily beaten my expectations and it's been extremely motivating - makes me super excited to show everyone what else I've got planned," he said. "If I have it my way, I'll be able to continue improving Telos for many years but I'd like to get people playing it as soon as possible - I'm going to try and make it available in some form sometime this year but I can't make any promises yet."
Telos is currently in development for PC, Mac and Linux. Check out its freewheeling movement system in the prototype video above.