Via IGN here's yet another pre-E3 reveal from High Voltage, The Grinder is a 4 player online co-op FPS. In a story featuring vampires, werewolves, and other monsters you play as four characters: Hector, an arrogant ex-pro hunter; AJ, the sole survivor of a Slasher attack on a sorority campout; Doc, a retired hunter and underground doctor; and Miko, a bored Japanese assassin seeking new thrills after killing her first werewolf. It's pretty much confirmed that she will wield swords as well as guns, with MotionPlus support. Characters and weapons will be upgradable.
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The E3 demo will include the melee-focused vampires that try to bite and claw you to death, werewolves which is like a mini-boss, and The Slasher which they're keeping mum about until E3. The full game will of course have many more enemies.
We call the technology our Imposter and Instancing system. We are able to take a single enemy and replicate him over and over again. Along with the replication, we can also scale, color, and otherwise modify each instance. This allows us to get an unprecedented number of unique enemies on screen at once at a fraction of the cost to do it otherwise. During our in-house testing, we have been able to see up-to 65 enemies on screen at once. These were initial tests… [Smiles]
We want to capture the sound of Trent Reznor and Ennio Morricone in bar room fight after watching Dusk Till Dawn, Dawn of the Dead, An American Werewolf in London, and Tremors and doing copious shots of tequila. Our phenomenally talented audio team is going for lots of Skinny Puppy / Coil-style ambience and music that that adapts to what is going on with gameplay. We're trying to alternate between creepy music that generates tension and all out frenzied tracks for the times where you're mowing down hundreds of vampires.
Controls will be more customizable than The Conduit. You can play single-player with AI partners (new players can jump in at any time) and splitscreen co-op. Online will support WiiSpeak. There will be leaderboard and achievements. The game progresses in stages with multiple paths created by event triggers. Like Left 4 Dead there is an AI "Architect" (not Director cause that'd just be cheating) that spawns enemies and adjusts difficulty based on your performance.
They're shooting for a Holiday 2010 release. Like The Conduit they're revealing this one before attaching a publisher. I seriously hope at least one (or better yet all three) of High Voltage's Wii games sells very well. With three visually impressive "hardcore" "mature" Wii games coming from the same developer using the same engine other devs won't have any excuse to settle for mediocrity and try to pass it off as the best Wii could do. *cough*ChopTilYouSuck*cough*DeadSpaceOnRails*cough* One thing though, High Voltage really needs to come up with better titles.
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