You'll die often, but like Dennaton's neon-laced hit, you'll fail, suppress your anger (visibly at least), swallow your pride, hit the retry icon and run back into the grinder until you make it through relatively unscathed.
It's hard, so wretchedly, infuriatingly hard. Retribution takes many cues from Hotline Miami and employs a similar, top-down perspective, throwing the player into areas filled with patrolling guards capable of killing you in one round or swing of the knife. I played it for about 40 minutes and I only stopped when the iPad's battery died.
His team enlisted the development skills of Edinburgh studio Blazing Griffin to create Retribution, and to make it something that would feel at home on a touch device without succumbing to the pared-back nature of games on iOS today. To Boniface, it was a classic case of square hole, round peg thinking that fell flat, due to the incompatibility of analogue controls and touch inputs. The result is APB: Retribution, a violent, gritty experience that looks to fill the gap in a tablet market dominated by simplicity, clones and colourful play-things.ĭuring our conversation he cited attempts to bring maturity to the tablet market through games like Dead Space, a title that tried to replicate the home console experience on iPad. If there's one thing to be taken away from the Realtime Worlds closure, it's that listening to your critics and acknowledging the market can prove valuable, and this is clearly something Boniface most certainly understands. The game failed to hit its target on Kickstarter, but Boniface said that the team simply took that as constructive criticism from the public, and began seeking APB's expansion elsewhere. The first proposed off-shoot was APB: Vendetta, an arena shooter that offered a wide range of deathmatch parameters, similar to Timesplitters and its ilk. He sees potential in branching out the city of San Paro and the gangs that dwell within to new properties on a variety of formats. The APB brand itself has endured, thanks to a make-over courtesy of Reloaded Productions, and it lives as a refined and improved MMO on Steam.ĪPB: Reloaded still enjoys positive thoroughfare online, but Reloaded Productions managing director Michael Boniface told me during a recent interview that he's never been one to let a good brand lie.
The closure of Realtime Worlds was indeed a kick to the kerb for many of Scotland's talented game creators, but here they are today working smarter, harder and with renewed focus. But what happened after the doors shut on 152 West Marketgait for the last time might make for less-attractive headlines in the mainstream press, but is arguably a more palatable story.įrom the ashes of APB grew a new wave of smaller, but ultimately wiser start-ups that had that negative experience on their side. It's now over three years later, and the demise of Realtime Worlds is scarcely spoken of beyond Scotland's borders. The company collapsed shortly after.Īs the administrators tied up their loose ends and shuttered the business, the press began to ask difficult questions as to why this was allowed to happen. Following years of delays and mounting investment from third-party firms, Realtime's MMO released to negative reviews. It was an intriguing story, one that saw former Grand Theft Auto developer Dave Jones taking on the world with his own crime-fuelled sandboxes Crackdown and APB. The rise and fall of prolific Dundee studio Realtime Worlds is well-documented. It wants to scratch that violent, mature itch with a Hotline Miami twist. The lyrics parallel Satoru’s heartbreaking dilemma as he tries his best to redeem his past.APB: Retribution developer Blazing Griffin looks to show the world that tablet gaming is more than just crushing candies and hurling birds. Here’s a cover of Sore wa Chiisana Hikari no Youna by Sayuri (although we used the dj-Jo version) that’s very dear to us-we love ERASED, and we love this song.
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