The stealth genre has always been hit or miss with its mechanics. Done right and you have a tense game of hide and seek, done wrong and you have a frustrating experience. As AAA game design modernized over the last decade, the stealth genre has been in a rut with few exceptions. Today’s kickstarter spotlight is for the game Tangiers, which is looking to the past of the genre, to create something brand new.
Tangiers:
Tangiers is an open world title where you play as a mysterious entity that has entered our world to find and kill five other beings. However, due to the entity’s appearance, reality has been torn apart and the city that you are exploring has been broken into multiple shards. These shards will also change based on what you do in the world.
The game’s art style is being described as 20th century avant garde and the screenshots and early footage looks incredibly interesting.
Tangier’s stealth gameplay is built off of the Thief series: Where you’ll need to stay in the shadows to avoid being detected. However, the game has two twists to set it apart from the classic series.
First is the open world nature of the game, with the game being promoted as changing based on your actions to give you a personalized world each time.
Second is the main character’s special ability to collect spoken words and use them in a variety of ways. If someone talks about going to get a smoke, you can pick up the word smoke and use it to create a smoke screen.
As it stands, there isn’t a lot of gameplay to go on with Tangiers but the concept has me interested. I’ve been waiting for an open world stealth game that lets the player off their leash to go out and do whatever they want to take down their targets. That is something the Assassin’s Creed series originally promoted but haven’t completely delivered on yet.
I do have a few concerns from what I’ve seen and read about Tangiers on their kickstarter page. First is the actual nature of the world itself. Depending on how big it is and how maneuverable the player, can make getting around more frustrating than tense.
The developers talk about side quests and hidden areas, but there currently isn’t any mention on character progression or reasons to go exploring. While the developers have said that the world will grow and change based on the player’s actions, it’s unknown at this time if the gamespace is going to be completely randomized or based on a pre-created set of variables and environment types.
The graphics and art style are definitely impressive but as with games with strong visual styles, I hope it isn’t too difficult to make out what is going on.
Lastly there is the length of the game, which the developers don’t have an exact idea due to how they are setting up the open world and having to find your targets. With only five targets does limit the amount of time, but the developers have said that they are aiming for enough time to pull you into the game.
At the time of this post, the kickstarter is just about a week away from being finished with just less than ten thousand pounds needed. The stealth genre hasn’t made too many big waves lately and maybe kickstarter is the way to redefine the act of sneaking around.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y7hhH-swN7w[/youtube]
